Facebook struggled to restore its services fully today after a 17-hour
partial outage made the world's largest social network inaccessible to users
across the globe, driving a wave of online complaints.
The number of reports on the crowd-sourced DownDetector website - one of the
internet's most used sources of numbers on outages - peaked at just over
12,000.
The numbers gradually fell to a couple of hundreds by this morning.
But with thousands of users complaining on Twitter under the hashtag
#facebookdown, a number of media reports put the number affected in the
millions.
The BBC and a handful of other media outlets said it was the platform's
longest ever outage. Reuters was not immediately able to verify those
claims.
Facebook representatives took to Twitter to update users on the problems.
A Facebook spokesman, asked by Reuters for more details, would only repeat
the company's initial statement on the outage yesterday, saying that it was
working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps were down for much of yesterday,
although the photo-sharing social network said it was back up early on
Thursday.
Facebook was yet to provide an update on its other services.
"Anddddd... we're back," Instagram tweeted along with a GIF image of Oprah
Winfrey screaming in excitement.
Social media users in some parts of the US and Europe as well as in Japan
were hit by the disruption, according to DownDetector's live outage map.
The California-based company, which gets a vast majority of its revenue from
advertising, told Bloomberg that it was still investigating the overall
impact "including the possibility of refunds for advertisers."
On Twitter it also said that the matter was not related to a distributed
denial of service (DDoS) attack.
In a DDoS attack, hackers use computer networks they control to send such a
large number of requests for information from websites that servers that
host them can no longer handle the traffic and the sites become unreachable.
Website:
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2019/0314/1036290-facebook-outage
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