Facebook, related apps experience hours-long outage

March 13 (UPI) -- Users of Facebook and its associated applications including Instagram and WhatsApp experienced issues accessing and posting on the platforms Wednesday.

Facebook issued a statement on Twitter responding to reports from users, saying it was aware of the outages on its "family of apps."

"We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," the company said.

At the peak of the outage, more than 11,000 Facebook users worldwide had issues with the platform, with 32 percent experienced a total blackout, according to website outage tracker Downdetector.com.

The company also confirmed the outage wasn't the result of a Distributed Denial-of-Service, DDoS, attack in which a site is overwhelmed with an influx of falsely generated traffic.