Facebook, Inc.'s social media and messaging applications experienced widespread outages Friday.
Online services such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook's own social media website were out for nearly 30 minutes.
Social media users immediately jumped to other networks to report the outage. Thousands of users submitted reports to DownDetector - which confirmed the outage. DownDetector said in a post Facebook's network went down at around 5:30 p.m. Eastern time. It reported more than 20 minutes later the network was back up for some users.
The outage affected Facebook's network across all devices - including its mobile and web-based applications. Users were unable to navigate to Facebook's website while those attempting to open Facebook applications were greeted with the "Sorry, something went wrong" message.
A Facebook representative said the company was experiencing problems with its network after a "configuration change." The representative said the error caused some of its services to be unavailable to some users. Technicians quickly found and resolved the issue, the representative said.
According to DownDetector, nearly 150,000 people reported the outage. Services such as its Oculus VR gaming network were also unavailable during the outage.
The outage was minor compared with previous service interruptions. Last month, the company experienced an hourslong outage that brought down most of its services.
On March 19, the company experienced a "technical issue" that interrupted services across its network. It was the longest outage for the company with users unable to access services for more than 12 hours.
In January, Facebook experienced a networkwide issue that logged out millions of accounts on its social media application. Facebook said at the time that the issue was caused by a "configuration change."
Facebook remains the world's largest social media service with close to 3 billion active monthly users. Pew Research Center estimates at least one in four adults in the U.S. log on daily.
