Facebook, Instagram go down over Thanksgiving

Social media platforms Facebook and Instagram went down for many on Thursday evening, as users worldwide and in India complained that they were unable to access their timelines or log in.

The tracking website, downdetector.in, reported a spike in users complaining about having trouble logging in or seeing their timelines at all in the case of Facebook. Many Facebook users saw an error dialogue with the text "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Likewise, a spike of reports about the Instagram timeline not working also appear on the site.

Facebook-owned Instagram responded to the issue on Twitter (which was functioning normally), saying, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook’s family of apps, including Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #InstagramDown”.

Many took to Twitter to lament about the issue. This led to the hashtags #InstagramDown and #FacebookDown trending, as well as an abundance of memes joking that people now had to spend time with their families on Thanksgiving rather than on social media.

Many brands also joined in on the fun, including the likes of Mercedez-AMG and MotoGP.

Since Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram share common architecture, they often go down together. However, Whatsapp users did not report any largescale outages.

The outages were also intermittent, with some users reporting being able to log in and access their timeline normally.