Facebook recovering from third outage in less than two weeks

Update September 28: Aaand Facebook is back. The social media site is recovering from an outage where it served up an error message to users for the second time since September 24 and the third time in less than two weeks.

We received this comment from a Facebook spokesperson at 1:12pm PT when we asked what caused this most recent outage:

"We're currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration issue. We're working to bring things back to normal for everyone. We apologize to those who have been inconvenienced."

From New York to San Francisco to the UK, users were without their Facebook fix. Though the service hobbled back in those areas (according to techradar staffers' own checks), some on Twitter said they are still unable to access the site. Even restored service was shaky, though by 2:29pm PT the site seemed to be functioning normally once more.

This hasn't been a good month for Facebook as far as outages are concerned: the first occurred on September 17, followed by one late last week and now again today. None of the outages have lasted very long (thank goodness). Still, Facebook probably wants to check its servers - or whatever keeps our News Feeds running - if it's experiencing total-site meltdowns this frequently.

Original post from September 24 below...

Facebook was down, at least at for a few minutes today, which is a rare event in the young life of Mark Zuckerberg's social networking website.

The homepage was inaccessible with a brief error message of "Sorry, something went wrong," followed by "We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can." That started appearing on our web browser and the mobile app at 9:25am PDT, 12:25pm PDT, and 5:25pm BST.

Facebook's billion users may have also encountered a "Service Unavailable" error message, which we found when trying to refresh the page too many times during the Facebook outage.

We've reached out to Facebook about the ongoing problems and will report back if they respond, but everything returned to normal for us at around at 9:47am, 12:47pm PDT, and 5:47pm BST.

Now that it's back, check out Facebook's new Star Wars 360-degree video, which is the first of its kind or watch the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift press conference livestream happening now.