Facebook Inc. and its services including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram suffered a brief downtime around 5:30 p.m. EDT today.

According to the downtime site Down Detector, the first reports of Instagram being down started at 5:13 p.m. EDT with a peak at 5:28 p.m. The last reports on the site were at 7:03 p.m., although some Twitter Inc. users were still reporting issues at 7:18 p.m.

The outage is reported to have affected all devices, including the web and mobile apps. How widespread it was is unknown, though along with the U.S., News.com.au reported, the outage was also experienced by users in Australia.

Facebook’s only comment on the outage at the time of writing came via its Twitter account, where it posted at 7:16 p.m. that “and we’re back!” before adding, “earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. Since then, we have quickly investigated and resolved the issue.”

Configuration change could mean one of a number of things — a Domain Name System change, a rollout out of updated code that may have broken the site or something as simple as an employee hitting a wrong button.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has had service issues in recent times. 9t05Google noted that a technical issue brought down the same Facebook products for several hours on March 19, although the number of users who reported problems on Down Detector was far fewer than today’s outage.

The site Currently Down provides a history of recent Facebook outages and they are fairly regular, although often not long. Along with the outage in March, Facebook also suffered multiple outages in September and roughly one a month through 2020 before that.

The outage comes amid concerns being raised about Facebook not properly informing customers affected by a data breach. The breach itself was a historical one, as in that it occurred several years ago, but with 533 million user records being offered on a hacking forum, some are demanding that Facebook do more.

Photo: Eduardo Woo/Flickr