Facebook, Instagram suffer outages

You can share this story on your wall ... or, well, maybe right now you can't.

Some Facebook and Instagram users on Wednesday afternoon reported having trouble posting, sharing posts, and chatting through Facebook's Messenger, so you and your friends are all on the same boat. 

The social networking sites appeared to be experiencing problems across many areas of the United States and Europe, as well as in some regions of Asia and South America, according to website monitor Downdetector.com. 

Facebook said it is aware of outages on its platforms, including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, and is working to resolve the issue.

According to Downdetector.com, which monitors websites, the outages started around noon Wednesday in parts of the United States, including the East and West coasts, parts of Europe and elsewhere. Both Facebook's desktop site and app appeared to be affected. Some users saw a message that said Facebook was down for "required maintenance."

Facebook did not say what was causing the outages. As of 4:45 p.m. service had been restored to some people, but other users were still reporting problems. Via its Twitter account, Facebook said the outage was not due to a "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attack, a type of attack that hackers use to interrupt service to a site.

With The Associated Press