You know social media means a lot to us humans when related apps manage to make the headlines just because they failed to work for a while. However, after being down for more than two hours yesterday, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are thankfully back on track.
Thousands of users all over the world reported issues with the family of social networking apps starting at around 6:30 AM ET on Sunday morning. Panic naturally ensued as news feeds failed to refresh themselves, the main Facebook.com domain became inaccessible all of a sudden and despairing users realized that they were unable to send messages via WhatsApp or post selfies on Instagram for more than two hours.
In a statement given to The Verge, a Facebook spokesperson said, “Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps. The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
As previously affected users know all too well, this isn’t the first time that Facebook has suffered an outage this year. Almost a month ago, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were all unavailable for hours in what was pretty much their worst outage ever. A full 24 hours elapsed before Facebook finally gave the green light, blaming a change in the server configuration for the problem.
When it happened yet again, users frantically took to Twitter to share their issues and lament about their predicament. In fact, according to the outage monitoring website Downdetector, more than 12,000 users reported facing issues with Facebook.
There were more than 3,000 incidents of people facing WhatsApp problems and almost 7,000 incidents of people unable to use Instagram. According to the site’s live map, the issues were prevalent in Europe and Asia.
There has been no comment so far on the causes behind the abrupt outage, but one can be sure to take this whole ordeal as a sign of the intricate link that our lives have with social media.
