Facebook and Instagram working again after widespread outage

Facebook said it has finished restoring access to users affected by Thursday’s outages on the company’s apps, including Instagram.

“Earlier today, people may have experienced trouble accessing Facebook’s family of apps. The issue has since been resolved, we are back to 100 per cent for everyone and we’re sorry for any inconvenience,” a Facebook company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The company said it became aware of the problem Thursday morning, after an issue in one of its central software systems caused trouble for users all over the world.

Downdetector, a digital outage tracker, said 2,000 people reported having problems with their Instagram accounts on its website by 9 a.m. on Thursday.

There are disruptions all over the world, with large, concentrated outages affecting western Europe and various parts of North America, according to Downdetector’s live outage map.

The outage does not appear to be affecting all users or the entire app — Downdetector said the influx of problems users reported involved the app’s newsfeed.

Problems were also reported with Instagram’s parent company, Facebook.

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Downdetector said over 1,300 users reported problems with the app, ranging from “total blackout” to issues accessing photos. Its live outage map showed a majority of the users reporting problems with their Facebook accounts are coming from the United States and Mexico.

Instagram tweeted it was working to fix the problem as early as 10:40 a.m.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook’s family of apps, including Instagram,” the social media platform tweeted.

The outage comes on the morning of Thanksgiving in the U.S., prompting jokes from Twitter users that they would be forced to actually interact with their family members.

In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he was planning to merge Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp to give them a shared back-end, which could mean they’ll all be more likely to go down together in the future.