Did you notice that one or all of Facebook’s family apps (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) has been down today? You are not alone because Facebook suffered the most severe outage in its history.
The social media app Facebook, its photo-sharing app Instagram, and social networking app WhatsApp are experiencing downtime with thousands of its users unable to access them globally, according to reports from outrage tracking website Downdector.com.
Although the cause of the interruption has not yet been made public, the social media giant turned to Twitter to acknowledge the glitch on it platforms.
Reports from downdetector show that there have been over 50,000 reports from users about Instagram currently unavailable, 33,000 for Facebook and over 121 reports for Facebook.
This problem is similar to the Slack outage which occurred last week, which was due to their recurring DNS problems. According to Downdetector, the current malfunctioning of the social media platforms is due to a widespread outage at Facebook.
Remember that this isn’t the first time the social media networks have been down. A similar incident occurred a few months ago. Instagram went down for 1 hour sometimes just last month, and all Facebook platforms went down in June.
Reports have it that the last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008 when the site had 150m users – compared to its over 2 billion active users today.
There are no words from Facebook yet about what may be causing the problems or when these platforms will be fully operational again. However, Facebook communications executive, Andy Stone, on Twitter, acknowledged that people were having trouble accessing Facebook apps and products.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a tweet. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The company’s shares dropped 5.6% to $323.95 at 12:47 p.m following the incident.
Some users reactions
This experience has continued to trail a lot of users’ reactions.