Facebook, Instagram hit by service outage

The feature is created to help users manage social networking by maintaining time spent per day on Facebook on a particular device for the past week and on an average, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday.

"The issue has since been resolved, we are back to 100 per cent for everyone, and we're sorry for any inconvenience". The hashtag #FacebookDown was trending on Twitter.

According to downdetector.com, a portal that tracks when outages happen in the digital world, reported outages were heaviest on the east coast of the United States and across Europe.

People are receiving a "service unavailable" message when trying to access Facebook in Brazil, Toronto, and Washington as well as Romania and Italy.

Facebook, which operates the Instagram photo-sharing platform and the WhatsApp and Messenger applications, has been under pressure in recent weeks over its handling of misinformation campaigns, and its hiring of a consultancy that sought to do damage control for the company. The social media giant said it had "identified 48 disruptions of Facebook services in 8 countries in the new reporting period, compared to 46 disruptions in 12 countries in the second half of 2017".

Facebook users have had issues logging into the social networking site's app and loading pages on the Facebook website.

In the meantime, Twitter is popping today and it's mostly because people can't write lengthy diatribes on Facebook or goof off in one of their private group boards.