Facebook And Instagram Went Offline Because Of A 'Networking Issue,' The Internet Reacts Hilariously

Recently, users across the globe found that Facebook and Instagram went down, with some running into error pages whenever they tried to access the websites.

As a result, many of the affected users took things to Twitter to express their outrage in comical ways and spread the word with the hashtag #facebookdown. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone.

Facebook, Instagram Offline

First things first, here's what went down (heh): Things started to get messy around 11:11 a.m. ET, which is when users started sending in reports, according to Outage Report (Facebook, Instagram).

Singing in the same tune is Down Detector (Facebook, Instagram), who also reports that complaints started flooding in around the same time.

Facebook says that the root of the problem was caused by a "networking issue," and based on the data at hand, it affected both desktop and mobile users and hit those who reside in the East and West coasts of the United States and Europe the hardest.

"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 representative says (via The Guardian).

During the outage, a small number of users still had access to Facebook and Instagram, but they came across difficulties in posting and other activities.

Needless to say, services are already back up at the time of this writing.

The Internet Reacts With #facebookdown

On a lighter note, the internet took the outage of Facebook and Instagram as an opportunity to throw around jokes on Twitter. It's more or less an expected response nowadays, considering there's a lot of precedent for things like this, such as when WhatsApp went down.