Facebook and Instagram fix second outage in a week

Facebook and other Facebook-owned properties, including Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced outages for the second time this week Friday. The company said all problems have been resolved and service has been restored. 

Reports from DownDetector.com show users first began having issues with the trio of apps around 2 p.m. EST. The outage appears to be widespread, with users unable to load their apps or post photos. 

"Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn't able to access our products in the last couple of hours," Facebook said in a statement to CBS News. "We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now."

Facebook said the outage was caused by a "configuration change" which affected users globally, but was in no way related to Monday's outage.

"Things have been fixed, and everything should be back to normal now," Instagram tweeted Friday. "thank you for bearing with us (and for all the memes this week)"

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook tweeted earlier Friday. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience."

The outage is Facebook's second technical difficulty this week. On Monday, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp users also reported outages. Facebook said the outage, which lasted six hours, was caused by a networking issue, which kept internal technology from communicating with each other. 

Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, lost $6 billion on Monday, along with other big tech stocks, according to Forbes. The company itself slid almost 5% after a Facebook whistleblower sat down for an exclusive interview with "60 Minutes." In the interview, which aired Sunday night, the whistleblower claimed Facebook is aware that misinformation is highlighted and spread on its platforms. Facebook has denied the allegation.