Both Facebook and Instagram went down on Thursday, affecting thousands of people around the world.
The outage was caused by a network configuration change, and was down for approximately an hour and a half between 13:30pm ET, and 3pm ET.
Users were mainly impacted in the New York, Florida, and California areas of the United States, with areas of Northern Europe also seeing a mass outage, with London, Paris, and Amsterdam being hit hardest.
A Facebook spokesperson told the Daily Mail: “Earlier today some people may have had trouble accessing our family of apps due to a network configuration change. This issue has since been resolved, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outage coincides with the week in which celebrities participated in a 24-hour social boycott, part of a celebrity movement battling against Facebook not doing enough to combat hate speech on the platform.
Celebrities involved in the boycott include actors Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Ruffalo, and reality star personality Kardashian West. The boycott took place on Wednesday – the day before the social platform went down.
Cohen is a longtime outspoken critic of Mark Zuckerberg, arguing the platform is a publisher and as such should be held responsible for the material on its site.
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