Facebook and Instagram discover what could be their longest outage

For some people, Facebook was still down early Thursday morning, more than 12 hours after the onset of problems and users who started reporting problems online.

People have reported problems since Wednesday shortly before noon, according to downdetector.com. Reports slowed around 10 pm Is, but bounced several times throughout the day.

Wednesday night, the majority of the problems appeared in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Tokyo.

Earlier in the day, users had reported that only certain pages would not be loaded, and Facebook had let them know that the site would be back soon.

"Facebook is down for the maintenance required right now, but you should be able to come back in a few minutes," reads the message.

But a few hours later, users still had problems with the social media site and its family of apps, including Instagram.

The company remained silent about Wednesday's issues, with the exception of two tweets on its official Twitter account.

Facebook said around 2 pm Eastern felt it was "working to fix the problem," then followed an hour later to confirm that the problem "was not related to a DDoS attack," which is an attack by denial of service distributed.

Raj Mathai, news presenter in San Francisco tweeted on Wednesday night, citing an internal Facebook source, that a database "was overloaded" and that the company was striving to make new machines work.

It is thought that this is one of the longest breakdowns of Facebook.

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Facebook

A link in the error message that users saw earlier in the day brought them to Facebook's help center. The article explains that Facebook is making improvements to the database on which the account is stored, but that the user account will not be affected.

The message also states that Facebook does not maintain the site for all accounts at the same time, so some users will be able to access the site while others will not be able to.

Personal accounts and Facebook pages also appear to be affected by the supposed maintenance. Users have reported that they can not comment on the publication of pages whose accounts are being serviced.

Users also reported that they could not connect to their Instagram accounts. With both applications down, many users go on Twitter to express their frustration.