Facebook grapples with another global outage

Facebook on Friday said users around the world again had problems accessing its services for hours due to a tweak of its system, just days after a massive outage caused in a similar fashion.

"Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn't able to access our products in the last couple of hours," a Facebook spokesperson told AFP about 9:30pm GMT.

"We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now."

Website trouble tracker DownDetector showed spikes in reports of problems accessing or using Facebook and its photo-centric Instagram network as well as Messenger and WhatsApp starting about three hours earlier.

Facebook attributed the trouble to a configuration change at its computing platform and said that it affected users of the social network and Instagram, Messenger and Workplace globally.

People flocked to Twitter to voice frustration.

"What's up with Instagram?" read a tweet that included a picture of cartoon character Bart Simpson sitting in a corner in apparent punishment.

"It's not even 4 days and it's already down again."

"Problems with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp AGAIN!" read a lament in a DownDetector chat forum.

Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world's reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.

In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that day's outage was caused by "configuration changes" on routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers.

It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the Internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed.

The outage on Friday was not related to the one earlier in the week, according to Facebook.