Facebook and Instagram appear to have recovered after brief outage

Facebook and Instagram were down on Thursday afternoon. The outage appeared to start around 5:30PM ET, with several thousand people reporting outages on DownDetector. The outage is the second one in less than a month from the social media giant; an outage on March 19th took its sites offline for several hours. Facebook returned a “sorry something went wrong” error message:

The company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on the cause of the outage; it’s unclear at this time when service will be fully restored. The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, first noted in a tweet from developer Jane Wong. Even Facebook’s outage dashboard appeared to be having problems.

Shortly after 6PM ET, Facebook and Instagram appeared to be coming back for most users, but Facebook’s status page never changed to reflect the outage while it was occurring.