Facebook has been in and out of scandals and front-page news for the past few years, however, this magnitude of suffering has not been seen since 2008. The social media giant, with approximately 2.3 billion monthly users, is suffering from a global outage for all of its family of applications due to some unknown reasons.
Users of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram have reported issues signing into the respective social media apps.
Usually, we see that these kinds of outages surface as a result of cyber attacks, however, this is not the case here. In a statement, Facebook said that they were aware that the problem was prevailing and that they are working on it, but they did not reveal the main reason behind this technical failure.
Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp messenger were affected in the same manner. The users were not able to send or receive pictures globally. Moreover, on Facebook and Instagram, neither the stories were uploading, nor the news feed was refreshing.
We’re aware of an issue impacting people's access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP.
— Instagram (@instagram) March 13, 2019
Where personal users were not affected much, all they got was a social media detox, real affectees were the large businesses and local entrepreneurs that took to Facebook for their business. Many of them took to Twitter to rant about Facebook not working.
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
— Meta (@Meta) March 13, 2019
Rumors are, this outage might be a result of politicians thinking that the large tech giants of the country must be broken down so that they don’t have much influence on the political rules and reasonings in the future.
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing and using Oculus. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience while we work through this.
— Meta Quest Help (@MetaQuestHelp) March 13, 2019
This problem surfaced on Wednesday 4 PM GMT (9 PM PST) and is still affecting millions of users to some extent. Where file sharing has been enabled, the news feed is still problematic.
It is currently being reported that while some mobile apps are working, web versions of Messenger, the basic functionalities of Instagram and some Facebook features are still unavailable to many users. Even Oculus seems to be having issues.
One of UK’s legislators tweeted, “look what happens when we let one country control everything”.
It looks like this is a small piece of a big monopoly in the US political game. Let’s see what comes next.
#SayNoToSocialmedia