Facebook said its website is back up after suffering a widespread outage for nearly two hours today.
“Traffic and error-rates are almost back to normal after a coordinated intervention by our engineering teams,” the company noted on its Platform Status page. “We are now monitoring the situation and we have our best engineers determining the root-cause of this issue that affected much of our web fleet. We apologize for any inconvenience and we aim to ensure that this issue does not repeat.”
Facebook initially reported the problem, which affected users across the U.S. on all of its platforms, around noon ET today. Users reported that their Facebook pages wouldn’t load at all or were slow to load.
Users from across the country were reporting that the site appeared to be working normally.
The problem reportedly was caused by an issue that affected all of the site’s API and web surfaces.
The company also said it was having API issues on Wednesday. “We had an increased rate of errors for the Graph API (/me/* and potentially other paths) at 18:01-18:14 PDT today,” Facebook noted on Wednesday. “We reverted the change that caused the issue and we’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.”
Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said today’s outage shouldn’t affect Facebook nearly as much as it hurt it users who like to post everything from updates about their morning jog to cute videos of their babies and pictures of their lunch.
“I wonder how people are coping with this?” he joked. “Are they walking around with tablets showing strangers the cute thing their cat did last night? How are they making sure that everyone knows what they are eating for lunch?”
As usual, when Facebook crashes, users turn to Twitter to vent their frustrations and make jokes at Facebook’s expense.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center got in on the action, not wanting to have its Facebook friends miss out on a photo it wanted to show off.
“While Facebook is down swing over to our @Flickr page & check out our latest @NASA_Hubble pic! pic.twitter.com/V5aSEMbAqa.,” tweeted @NASAGoddardPix ( twitter.com/NASAGoddardPix)
And @helpnetsecurity tweeted, “Facebook is down. I can hear the screams from outside. Something is burning. gotta keep calm.”
Another Twitter user, @MarkAgee, also got in on the fun, tweeting, “The year is 2016. Facebook down for two years now. America’s new moms roam the streets. Is my baby pretty? They say. Please like my baby.”
“When Twitter’s down, everyone in my Facebook feed is in a blind panic,” tweeted @MrsFridayNext ( https://twitter.com/MrsFridayNext ) .
And @7Marshall tweeted, “Twitter’s purpose today? Complain about #Facebook being down.”