Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram down, global outrage

Ipsita

Facebook and Instagram users complained that they could not access the social media platforms along with WhatsApp. These media sites went down late on Monday night which was 4th October 2021. A technical failure disrupted their services. The platforms which the American giant Facebook owns experienced this failure at around 9 pm (Indian time). As this happened, millions of users complained that their fresh messages were not loading. Their feed was disrupted too.

When contacted, a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement, “We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” As soon as the outages affected the services, users took to the micro-blogging site Twitter to complain about the disruption in services. The Instagram community also took the help of Twitter to keep people updated about the crash down of their services. They said, “Instagram and friends are having a bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we are on it.”

The shares of Facebook had nearly 2 billion daily active users. It fell by 4.9% on Monday amidst a broader selloff in technology stocks. According to the security experts, the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake. But they are sure that sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. Soon after the outage, Facebook users were having trouble accessing its apps. But they did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem. They did not even open their mouth to say how many people the outage affected.

Facebook’s entire engineering team apologized as soon as the apps started to come back online. On Monday, they tweeted, “To the huge community of people and businesses who depend on us, we are sorry. We have been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report that they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.” Several Facebook employees who did not reveal their identity believed in a theory as to why the outage occurred. They said that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on the same domain in order to work.

On October 5, 2021, Facebook CEO broke the silence about the three of his apps being out of service. There was a global outage of almost 6 hours. He said that the services were coming back online. Furthermore, he added, “Sorry for the disruption today. I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” On the very same day, Facebook tweeted, “We have been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report that they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

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