Facebook and Instagram back after 10-hour outage
Social media sites Facebook and Instagram are back online, at least 10 hours after users around the world reported an outage.
About 4pm, users were fully able to access both social media sites, although it had not been confirmed by the social media giant.
Facebook acknowledged the issue just before 7am NZT on Thursday, saying it wasn't because of a cyber attack.
"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," it said on Twitter.
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"We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."
Some users were able to access parts of Facebook, but not all.
The Instagram app was showing posts, but was not up to date for some users.
People took to Twitter to share their frustration at not being able to access the websites and apps.
Canterbury Police posted a warning on Twitter asking Kiwis not to call 111 over the issue: "Unfortunately we cannot do anything about this because, you know, they're based in America and we're the police."
In a response to a Twitter use, Canterbury Police said it had not had any calls but had received calls about social media outages in the past.
Earlier on Thursday, some users trying to access Facebook were met with a message saying "Facebook will be back soon".
"Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few hours."
New Zealand Parliament also tweeted that the outage would mean its select committee meeting would not be live streamed on Thursday morning.
"Public meetings will be recorded and uploaded to committees' Facebook pages later today," it said.
Just before midday, Instagram posted on its official Twitter saying: "We're aware of an issue impacting people's access to Instagram right now.
"We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP."
Instagram has 1 billion active users every month.
As of December 31, Facebook has more than 2.32 billion monthly active users.
Website DownDetector is reporting the issues with the social media sites.
It is showing outages in the United States, Europe, Japan, Manila, Australia and New Zealand.
On Wednesday, another outage affected Gmail and Google Drive users around the world.
People reported having trouble loading the website and sending emails.
Many vented their frustration on social media.
According to the website outage.report, there were 1276 reports of problems with Gmail in a 20 minute period.
They came from the United States, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada and 55 more countries.
A spokeswoman for Google said it was aware of the problem.
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