Facebook’s site ‘down for maintenance’ in widespread outage

Facebook was down for many users worldwide on Wednesday — an outage that Facebook’s site attributed to “required maintenance.”

“Facebook will be back soon,” according to a message posted on the social-networking site shortly after the outage began early Wednesday afternoon and continued well into the afternoon.

In a post on Twitter, Facebook said it was working to resolve the issue “as quickly as possible.”

Facebook also said that the crash was not due to a DDoS attack — in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with fake traffic and cause it to crash.

Users quickly began complaining about issues creating posts, as well as looking at content on the website. Others say they have been unable to access the platform altogether.

“Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few minutes. In the meantime, read more about why you’re seeing this message. Thanks for your patience as we improve the site.”

The problems were happening across the globe, with large parts of the US and Europe affected, according to outage tracking website Down Detector.

Facebook-owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp are also experiencing performance issues, according to some users.

Facebook reps did not immediately respond to a request for comment.