Facebook's website and mobile app slowly went back online after many users lost their connection on the afternoon of September 28, Monday, during the social network's third outage in three weeks. The disruption of service seemed to affect a wide geographical range of Facebook users, and the source of the social media giant going offline could have been a configuration problem.
The Currentlydown.com site reported that Facebook was not functioning for around 42 minutes, according to Reuters. That was from 3 pm. To 4 pm. ET.
Meanwhile, the social network's map on Downdetector.com, a disruption-monitoring site, also indicated a severe outage. That was in regions of North America.
The social network stated that it was restoring Facebook services back to their normal state, and also apologized to users who had been troubled. However, its Messenger service was up and running during the service disruption.
Some users only experienced slow load times. However, others were able to access the website and smartphone app during Monday afternoon.
Facebook's platform status dashboard noted a "major" outage at around 3:00 pm Eastern Time, according to Mashable. Its dashboard monitors a device that developers use for the social network.
The social network's most recent outage is the third one in the past three weeks and the most serious one after it also went down on September 17 and September 24, Thursday. Last week the site went offline in North America, Europe, India, and Australia.
Many users complained about the outage on Twitter. The #FacebookDown hashtag started to trend online.
Facebook's stock shares dropped almost 4 percent on Thursday. It closed at $89.21.