DUBLIN — Millions of Facebook users got to experience first-hand what a Facebook-free day feels like when the social network, along with its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, went down for 22 hours for some users. It’s not yet clear what caused the outage, which is unusual. Hilariously, Facebook was forced to use Twitter to communicate with the internet about the outage. Hopefully, the affected users enjoyed their social media-free day – I know I enjoy the days when I choose not to compulsively hop online. – Felicity Duncan
Facebook and Instagram Suffer Lengthy Outages
By Georgia Wells
A widespread outage that affected millions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users Wednesday stretched well into Thursday morning, in one of the longest disruptions for the tech giant’s service in years.
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A Facebook Inc. status page for developers listed the outage as lasting 22 hours Thursday on the East Coast. An overnight message on Instagram’s Twitter account said the photo-sharing service was back running again, though some users reported lingering issues.
While internet companies occasionally experience outages caused by problems ranging from natural disasters to surges of web traffic, it is rare for such an established company to go down for so long. The outage could force Facebook to issue refunds to advertisers – many of which use its platforms as a core means of reaching consumers – and further damage a brand already dented by scandals surrounding privacy and data protection.
Facebook’s woes quickly became top news on Twitter Inc.’s rival network, where the day’s top trending topics included #FacebookDown.
“To all my friends who work as digital marketers/social media specialists: take a day off and have a good rest,” one user posted to Twitter.
Facebook’s primary communication about the outage also took place on Twitter. The company didn’t identify a cause, but said it wasn’t related to a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which nefarious actors coordinate to bring down a service.
We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
“We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” Facebook said in a tweet.
Write to Georgia Wells at [email protected]
