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Facebook outage: users are reporting issues with the social network

Facebook outage: users are reporting issues with the social network

Digital Trends8 hours ago
When Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, the groundswell of people rushing to other platforms to continue their social posting and messaging -- likely to poke fun at Facebook, frankly -- was intense. So much so, it seems, that Twitter is also experiencing problems.
Everyone's favorite doomsday watchlist Downdetector shows many reports of issues with Twitter, and staff members here at Digital Trends are seeing intermittent problems loading tweets -- both on the timeline and from individual links. So far the issue doesn't seem universal, and content usually loads after a handful of page refreshes, so we can hope this is a little blip and not the start of a larger problem.
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