'Biggest' outage hits Facebook, Instagram users worldwide

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook grappled on Thursday with a widespread outage, forcing millions of people to taste life without the world's largest social media platform. It was probably the last thing Facebook needed as it stumbles from problem to problem, including outrage over its use of customers' private data.

The outage began Wednesday afternoon and triggered a flood of gripes on downdetector.com, which tracks trouble accessing online pages, and on rival Twitter.

A Downdetector map late on Wednesday showed Facebook service troubles persisting in parts of Australia, Asia, Europe, South America and North America.

As of early Thursday the problem remained in parts of Europe and Asia, although moaning from America and else where kept coming.

"You guys should look in the mirror at yourselves and hear how you sound," a person with the handle Johanna wrote on Downdetector.