“Earlier today (Tuesday), a server configuration caused intermittent problems across all apps globally creating a degraded experience for users. The issue has since been resolved, we are back to 100 percent for everyone and we’re sorry for any inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson told ABC News in an emailed statement.
The outage comes at a particularly sensitive time for the company. Many businesses use Facebook and Instagram to promote pivotal Black Friday sales, some of which have already started. The retail sector took a bleak turn in the stock market on Wednesday, which may make companies who partnered with Facebook particularly concerned about the outage.
The company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg was even mocked over the weekend on "Saturday Night Live."
In addition to Facebook, the company owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
Users around the world took to Twitter early Tuesday to complain about the outages, which didn't affect all users.
According to the Facebook's site for developers, the "degraded performance" started around 6 a.m. Eastern.
Today’s outage marks the second major downtime event for Facebook this month, following a shorter outage for about a half-hour on November 12th, which the company commented to USA Today was caused by a “routine test.”