Yesterday, Facebook users were having trouble loading photos, news feeds, videos and more. This triggered most users to check if their internet connection was working properly, since even Instagram and WhatsApp weren’t working properly. However, it turns out that there was a global outage on Facebook and its family of apps: Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
As always, people took over Twitter to complain about the outage, which is the second in the last month and probably one of the biggest since. Facebook and its family of apps cumulatively have 4+ billion users, which means that even if a small number of people were affected, the count could go up to millions if not billions. At the same time, Twitter intercepted a bug causing the inability to send direct messages on the platform, which became another thing to mock for Twitteratis, although the problem was fixed instantaneously.
At 7:49 PM ET (5:19 AM, July 4), Facebook posted on its Facebook Business handle that the service has been restored and must be working at 100%. A similar post appeared on the official Instagram handle on the photo-sharing app after Facebook was able to fix the issue.
Apparently, the issue, as quoted by Facebook, was triggered due to a routine maintenance operation gone wrong, which produces a knock-on effect on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp since all these three giants share the same infrastructure. DownDetctor was able to locate the most affected regions along with the number of complaints and reports received based on the type of problem, which gave an insight into what features were facing problems on either of the services.
The Independent quoted that the issue severely caused service outages in South America, Japan, Europe, and the U.S. In fact, at the time of writing this blog, I did a little digging on DownDetector and it turns out that there are still many people facing issues on the said services, in the U.The U.S. and Europe while the outage is not widespread in other regions.
Instagram was facing trouble in loading photos within the newsfeed as well and especially in India and the United Arab Emirates. The service has since been restored after the problem with the routine maintenance operation was fixed and the app/site was brought back online at 100% although there might be millions still facing the same issues. Finally, WhatsApp was in a fixed at the same time, since it faced trouble sending messages, voice, videos, and photos as well.
Facebook shared an overview of what triggered the problem but declined to comment on it further. Like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down, people took over Twitter to complain and make fun of the trio by sharing memes and what not.
While the service is working completely fine for us, there’s no certainty that it is up and working around the globe. Tell us if you are facing any trouble loading photos on Instagram or sending messages on WhatsApp; or loading photos, news feed or messaging on Facebook & Facebook Messenger. Do check out the current status of the massive outage on DownDetector. Stay tuned on TrueTech for more information.
