Facebook 4th of July Outage: There was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes

Some Facebook users met the following message on Friday morning, July 4, 2014 at about 6:00 a.m. CDT ...

"There was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes."

System outages are rare, but social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter experience disruptions from time to time, often because some servers, routers or other service are knocked offline, or an upgrade or scheduled maintenance has run into a snag.