Instagram, Facebook recover after brief outage

Instagram and Facebook were down for a brief time in many parts of the world.

Facebook services suffer outage. (AP)

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."

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."

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.