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Facebook platform users hit Twitter with #facebookdown on Wednesday after losing access to Facebook, Instagram and Messenger around the world.
Wochit, USA TODAY & # 39; HUI

After spending a good part of Wednesday, Facebook started coming back to life early Thursday after midnight ET for many users.

This outage is one of the longest that the very popular social network has known for 15 years.

Facebook and Instagram started having problems around noon, Eastern Time, with problems popping up on Facebook itself, Facebook Messenger and Instagram around the world.

Some WhatsApp users belonging to Facebook have reported problems when sending photos on the famous email application.

The cause of Wednesday's problem was not immediately clear. Some users reported seeing a message that the site was down for "maintenance required", while others were able to briefly load social networks before discovering that their features were limited.

Instagram tweeted that service was back at 12:41 on Thursday, Eastern time.

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"We are aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the family of Facebook applications," said a Facebook spokesman in a statement sent to USA TODAY earlier Wednesday. "We are working to solve the problem as quickly as possible."

According to tweets and the DownDetector.com tracking website, users in Asia still had problems Thursday morning.

In a tweet at 3:03 pm and Wednesday, the company reiterated that she was still working on a fix. Facebook also confirmed that the outage did not result from a distributed denial of service attack or DDoS.

As with almost all Facebook crashes, users have headed to Twitter with the hashtag #FacebookDown quickly becoming the most popular subject in the United States.

In November, Facebook was down for about half an hour and the company said the blackout was the result of a "routine test".

Rob Leathern, product director on Facebook, tweeted Wednesday afternoon, officials knew "that users were having problems accessing our interfaces for ads. We will share an update as soon as possible. "

Around 9:30 pm PT Wednesday evening Leathern tweeted "I do not have an update yet :("

A Facebook spokesman told USA TODAY that as of 22:00. AND, there was no update on when the service will be completely restored.

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Contributor: Eli Blumenthal; Jessica Guynn; Jefferson Graham

Follow Kelly Tyko, USA TODAY reporter, on Twitter: @KellyTyko

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