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Facebook turns to Twitter to explain outages

Posted at 5:36 PM, Mar 13, 2019
and last updated 2019-03-13 19:36:16-04

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, relied on Twitter on Wednesday to explain that its apps were experiencing outages around the world.

Some users of Facebook and other platforms owned by the tech giant, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, experienced problems accessing the services. Many people went on Twitter to vent their frustration.

The outages began Wednesday afternoon and appeared to affect people in multiple areas, including the US, Central and South America, and Europe, according to tweets and the outage-tracking site DownDetector.com.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” Facebook tweeted.

Despite some early online rumors that the outages were the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack — a type of hack in which attackers flood a company’s network — Facebook said in another tweet that “the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.”