Facebook is down with a generic ‘Service Unavailable’ error (Update: It’s back)

At about 11:04 a.m. PST today (2:04 p.m. EST), Facebook went down. VB staff from across the world confirmed they couldn’t reach the social network — the site either merely loaded a blank page or a generic “Service Unavailable” error message.

We also couldn’t reach Instagram and Facebook Messenger for a few minutes, but those services were quickly restored.

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A quick check at DownForEveryoneOrJustMe confirmed the issue was widespread: “It’s not just you! http://facebook.com looks down from here.”

And as always, users took to Twitter to discuss the outage (the time of the tweet lines up with when we first noticed a problem):

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facebook down? #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/shtOeI7wHT

— Youry De Winter (@YouryDW) September 17, 2015

We have contacted Facebook for more information and will update you if we learn the cause of the outage.

Update at 11:09 a.m.: For most users, the outage lasted only about five minutes.

Update on September 24: Facebook went down again on September 24.

Update on September 28: Facebook went down again on September 28.