California, April 9: Social networking sites Facebook and Instagram were temporarily down on Thursday in many parts of the world for a short duration because of which users were unable to send or receive messages. A message many users saw: "Sorry, something went wrong" and on the app under news and groups, a message said the pages weren't available and that it "maybe because of technical error that we're trying to get fixed." WhatsApp and Instagram Down: Users Take on Twitter to Report Outage of Facebook-Owned Social Media Services. 

Both platforms were back online a little after 6 pm (local time)."Earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. We quickly investigated and resolved the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience," a Facebook company spokesperson told The Hill. The social media giant's products went offline last month as well, which the company chalked up to a "technical issue." Facebook, Instagram Down: Users Face Error Message, Complain About Outage on Twitter.

According to media reports, in January, an unknown number of users were logged out of their accounts, which Facebook said was a configuration error.

In March 2019, Facebook had one of the longest outages in the company's history and was out for many users for more than 12 hours.

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