Facebook, its apps suffer most severe outage in their history

Tech

Published: 2019-03-14 11:11

Last Updated: 2024-03-28 05:47


Facebook, its apps suffer most severe outage in their history
Facebook, its apps suffer most severe outage in their history

As of Wednesday afternoon, March 13, 2019, Facebook has suffered the most severe outage in its history, with key services became unusable for users all over the world, according to BBC News.

Facebook's main products, namely Whatsapp (Facebook's other messaging app), Facebook Messenger and Instagram (image sharing app) were all affected.

The main cause of the interruption has not yet been detected.

The last time Facebook had suffered such a severe outage was in 2008 when it had 150 million users, when compared with around 2.3 billion monthly users nowadays.

Facebook's apps seemed to be back on Thursday morning, March 14, 2019, with Instagram announcing it was back.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," Facebook said in a statement.

"In response to rumors posted on other social media platforms, the company said the outages were not a result of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, known as DDoS - a type of cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic," according to BBC News.

While Facebook's main service appeared to load, users said they were not able to post, comment and share.

Instagram users were not able to refresh feeds, post photos or add photos and videos to their Instagram stories.

Facebook Messenger's desktop version did not load, while some users of the mobile app were able to send messages; however, users reported glitches with other kinds of content, such as images.

"The issue also affected Facebook Workplace, the service used by businesses to communicate internally," BBC News stated.

While Facebook and Instagram were down, many users turned to Twitter in order to make jokes about the outage.

The hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown were used over 150,000 times.

"Some Twitter users who work in "Facebook-centric" jobs, expressed their panic and distress at being unable to use the platform," BBC added.