Facebook Down, Not Working? How To Fix It

Some Facebook users were experiencing issues loading the site Wednesday. Outage reports from DownDetector were showing that the issues were occurring worldwide but especially in the United States and Europe.

Reports of the outage started spiking a little after 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday and were continuing more than half an hour later. Most of the reports were of a total outage, even the landing page, Facebook.com, wasn't working for some time.

Users were also reporting the outages on Twitter although Facebook was not responding to any of those users on that platform. Some users were tweeting wondering if the site was down for everyone or if it was a more isolated incident.

Users were expressing their feelings about the outage with a lot of GIFs on Twitter.

Especially those who use Facebook for their jobs.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” a Facebook spokesperson told International Business Times.

Some users were saying that the outage was planned and was due to scheduled maintenance for the site, something Facebook did not confirm to IBT.

This was however confirmed only by the failed login page on Facebook.com that alerted users to the outage.

Facebook's Help Center was working and a page said that messages that say Facebook will be back soon meant there was an ongoing "improvement to the database your account is stored on," being made. This means that while user accounts are ok and unharmed, they are inaccessible. Additionally, the page said "Keep in mind, we don't do site maintenance on all accounts at the same time. It's possible that your friends will be able to access the site while your account is still unavailable."

Facebook outage, how to fix it:

There isn't much you can do as a user to fix the Facebook outage. The issues seemed to hit the web platform for the site first. While the app was working for some users after the outage it too went down around noon EDT. In addition to the Facebook app the messenger app was down as well.

The issues seemed to have more to do with Facebook's servers than with the individuals trying to use the apps or page, meaning nothing on the user's end would be able to fix the outage. Users simply need to wait this one out. Even once the app and site are back up and running they might be delayed for some time.

By 2:30 p.m. EDT most users were able to use Facebook with no problems. "Earlier today, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Facebook services. We quickly investigated and started restoring access within about an hour, and we have nearly fixed the issue for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson told IBT.

Update: This story has been updated to include a statement from Facebook about the outage.