Days before Thanksgiving, three of the most popular social networking tools in the United States suffered a major outage. The blackout began being noticeable on Tuesday morning as hundreds of users reported that they are unable to access Facebook and Instagram. Many users shared that they are experiencing difficulties with other Facebook-owned apps such as the instant messaging service WhatsApp. The hashtag #FacebookDown immediately became a trending topic on the rival social network Twitter. Most of the affected users received the following error messages when they tried to access some of the Facebook services: “service unavailable” and “sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it, and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
Almost immediately, Facebook acknowledged the issue through the company’s Twitter profile. A tweet sent from Facebook’s official Twitter account said that they are aware that there are some people experiencing difficulties accessing the Facebook family of apps. Facebook confirmed that they are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Mark Zuckerberg’s communications team gave the same statement to ABC News a few hours after the outage was acknowledged on Twitter confirming the issue hasn’t been resolved yet. It is currently unknown if hackers are behind the outage, or it is an internal issue.
Who was affected by the Facebook outage?
The outage affected users living on the East Coast of the United States as well as people residing in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Portugal and the majority of Eastern Europe. South America’s Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia were also affected by the outage.
What caused the Facebook outage?
Facebook has not yet identified the source of the problem. Currently, no evidence confirms the outage is a result of a data breach or a cyber-attack.
How many people were affected?
There isn’t an official number of people who have been affected. However, Facebook apps are used by billions of people from all over the world, and even small glitches could impact hundreds of millions of people.
Facebook is going through tough times, and this is starting to be noticeable on the stock market – Facebook stock is continuing to dip. The outage won’t help Facebook get out of its track to post a three-month losing streak. This outage is also the company’s second for this month. According to Mark Zuckerberg’s communications team, the blackout that happened a couple of weeks ago was a result of a routine test that went bad. Facebook is currently unable to confirm if the incidents are related.
If you are reading this article and you are still unable to access Facebook or Instagram, it is very likely that Facebook is still investigating the issue and working on a resolution. You can see the status of this issue on Facebook for Developers here.
