3 min read

The biggest interruption ever suffered by Facebook goes beyond 14 hours at a stretch. Twitter was flooded with tweets about Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp been down intermittently in some parts of the world on all of Wednesday.

Facebook itself had to turn to its rival Twitter to explain that its group of hugely popular apps are having difficulties.

Some users of Facebook and other platforms owned by the tech giant — including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — reported problems accessing the services and posting content.

According to DownDetector, it looks like the outages are mainly in New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; Japan; Malaysia and the Philippines. Users have written in from Canada, Las Vegas, and Turkey to confirm outages there as well.

The outage caused a bigger hit to the revenue of advertisers on Facebook that spend large amounts of money to reach potential customers on Facebook platforms. The Facebook spokesperson says we are investigating the possibility of refunds to the advertisers.

The cause of the interruption has not yet been made public.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” tweeted from the official Facebook account.

“We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

In response to rumours posted on other social networks, 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.

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users – compared to around 2.3bn monthly users today.

Users funnily turn to Twitter in absence of Facebook and Instagram

While Facebook and Instagram have been down, many have turned to Twitter to make jokes about the outage.

The hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown have been used more than 150,000 times so far.

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

Many shared jokes about the social media outage leading to the collapse of society, as “nobody remembers how to reach loved ones or eat food without posting updates”. Many tweeted about Facebook users tweeting for the first time.

Others have shared a version of the “distracted boyfriend” meme, referencing people turning to Twitter in their hour of need.

Some joked that the lack of access to Facebook would deprive them of validation.

Apart from Twitter there are interesting reactions from users on Hacker News which goes like a sudden increase in worker productivity, a brief glimpse into your neighbor’s vacation story, or Facebook launching tools to manage spending time on social media, etc.

It’s been a good couple of hours that Facebook tweeted about resolving the issue. The company has provided no further updates in the fourteen hours since then.

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Fatema Patrawala
Being a Senior Content Marketing Editor at Packt Publishing, I handle vast array of content in the tech space ranging from Data science, Web development, Programming, Cloud & Networking, IoT, Security and Game development. With prior experience and understanding of Marketing I aspire to grow leaps and bounds in the Content & Digital Marketing field. On the personal front I am an ambivert and love to read inspiring articles and books on life and in general.