Facebook, Instagram users across U.S. experience outages

EL PASO, Texas -- Facebook and Instagram users across the U.S. reported problems accessing the popular social media sites for roughly 15 minutes on Thursday afternoon, according to the outage tracking website DownDetector.com.

A reason for the outage was not immediately known. There was no information provided by Facebook Engineering on the issue.

Users visiting Facebook durigng the outage received a browser message that read: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

According to DownDetector, tens of thousands of users nationwide began reporting the outages around 3:30 p.m. Mountain Time. Service appeared to have been restored for most users about 3:45 p.m.

DownDetector tracks internet outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Facebook and Instagram are two of America's top 20 websites, according to Alexa.com, an Amazon-owned firm that measures web visitors.