Facebook Wasn’t Working, But Is Now: Why It Apparently Went Down

Facebook crashed late Monday afternoon to the dismay of thousands of users, but there’s good news: The social media site was restored after a nearly 40-minute total blackout, and several hours of partial problems.

The cause of the crash was "a configuration issue," though what that means wasn't immediately clear.

As of 6:58 p.m. EDT, Down Detector reported there were “no problems at Facebook.” A graph showed that many users had difficulty with the social media site at 3 p.m. EDT. Nearly four hours later, full service had been restored for most users.

More than half of the people experiencing problems witnessed a total blackout of the site, Down Detector reported. More than 30 percent had problems logging in, and nearly 15 percent had difficulty with photos.

Since Facebook wasn’t working properly, hundreds of netizens flocked to Twitter to tweet about their dismay. The hashtag #FacebookDown soon became a popular trend on the 140-character miniblog.

A Facebook spokesperson told International Business Times it was trying to work out the kinks. Today's FB crash was the third this month and the second this week. “We’re currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration issue,” the representative said. “We’re working to bring things back to normal for everyone. We apologize to those who have been inconvenienced."

Like Twitter, FB has a tab for top-trending topics. In the Science and Technology section, #FacebookDown was the most popular subject.

The problem occurred due to a “configuration issue,” ABC Online revealed. Users were greeted with the following message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Facebook has nearly 1.5 billion users. Its shares (NASDAQ:FB) went down 3.8 percent to $89.24 during late-afternoon trading Monday.

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