Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc. attends the Viva Tech start-up and technology gathering at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2018 in Paris, France. Christophe Morin/IP3 | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Facebook users around the world reported issues logging into and posting on the site as well as on Instagram and WhatsApp thoughout the day on Wednesday. The outages lasted about a full day, and was Facebook's longest downtime ever. In a statement Thursday, the company blamed a "server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues" for the outages. The company said its services were coming back online. "Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues," said a Facebook spokesperson. "As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services. We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone's patience."

Facebook previously acknowledged the outage in a tweet Wednesday, saying, "We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible." It later confirmed the problem was not the result of a DDoS attack, which refers to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack in which a hacker overwhelms a site by flooding it with fake traffic. Tweet Facebook shares were relatively unchanged Wednesday afternoon but slid about 1.8 percent Thursday morning. Reports of problems with Facebook peaked at over 12,000 worldwide late Wednesday according to Downdetector, a website where users can report problems on apps and websites. Downdetector listed over 300 reports Thursday morning, and many people reported their access had been restored, but Facebook has not yet confirmed the issues were resolved.