Facebook and Instagram are down

© Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook and Instagram were down Thursday afternoon. The outage appeared to start around 5:30PM ET, with several thousand people reporting outages on DownDetector. The outage is the second in less than a month from the social media giant; an outage on March 19th took its sites offline for several hours.

The company didn't immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on the cause of the outage; it's unclear at this time when service will be fully restored.

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