Facebook and Instagram went down today. Users of both popular social networking sites had two options: go outside or take the grievances to Twitter. Since you are reading this on the internet, you can probably guess that people opted for the latter. The influx of Facebook users was so high #FacebookDown trended globally on Twitter as Facebook users looked for confirmation that it wasn’t just them experiencing problems.

For the first few hours, Facebook itself was not a reliable source on the outage. Despite users reporting issues with the site as early as 11:11 am, Facebook’s Platform Status page didn’t reflect this until after 1 pm.

During the outage, Down Detector had over 12,200 reports with Outage Report recording an additional 2,000 people having issues. Of the users reporting Facebook issues on Down Detector, 41 percent were experiencing a total blackout, 38 percent couldn’t log in, and the remaining 20 percent couldn’t use the app.

Most of the users experiencing issues were in North America and Europe, but the site was down globally. The Guardian and Mashable both suspect this is due to the number of users in those regions and the timing of the outage. It was mid-morning on the US west coast, around lunch time on the US east coast, and in the early evening in the UK. All those time periods experience heavy traffic because users are either checking their feeds before work, during lunch (or, if we’re being honest, work), or after getting off from work.

When those users went to log in, some were met with the message: “Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few minutes. In the meantime, read more about why you’re seeing this message. Thanks for your patience as we improve the site.”

While the maintenance may have been required, it does not seem to have been planned. However, The Guardian is reporting that suspicious activity is not believed to have caused the Facebook and Instagram outage.