Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp all went down last night as the social media giant suffered its worst outage ever.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, started working again in the early hours of this morning, but Instagram remained down with users unable to log in. Facebook users complained that they couldn’t post new messages or like other people’s posts.
Pages remained viewable, but could not be updated.
Issues remain. WhatsApp users are complaining that they are unable to send picture messages, for example.
A Facebook spokesperson told The Sun: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps.
“We’re working to resolve this issue as soon as possible.”
According to the Down Detector website, which records outages of this kind, the most complaints (35%) said there was a total Facebook blackout, closely followed by issues with the news feed (33%) and problems logging in (30%).
Instagram users reported issues with the news feed (56%), logging in (28%) and the service generally (14%).
The issues affected users all over the world, from the UK and Europe, to the US, South America and Asia.
According to Facebook’s status page, the platform is currently “healthy”, though anecdotal evidence says the opposite. The Facebook website claims the outage is related to “required maintenance”, though it doesn’t elaborate further.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are among the most popular mobile apps in the world. Facebook alone has more than 2 billion users, while the Instagram app is used by more than 1 billion people every month.
Recently, Mark Zuckerberg set out a bold new vision for the future of Facebook. Instead of relying on people sharing content publicly, it will pivot to focus on privacy, with the core offering being encrypted messages shared between groups of people, much like WhatsApp.
Though questions remain – will Facebook as we know it cease to exist? Or will it operate as a supplementary service? And how will Facebook fund this new direction, considering the current one relies people giving up their privacy to advertisers? Hopefully we will get some answers soon.
