Back Facebook had only 80 million users, but nowadays the behemoth boasts 3 billion users, so depending on how you measure it, the current outage might actually surpass the 2008 one in its scope. In the shutdown, Facebook employees also lost access to their own tools and platforms.įacebook is no stranger to breakdowns, suffering two just this year, in April and July, “due to a network configuration issue,” but according to CNBC, this is the worst outage since 2008, when the social media platform was out for almost one day.
According to them, the most plausible scenario is a configuration error that left directions to Facebook servers unavailable, the result of an internal mistake, but sabotage by an insider could also be a possibility. A cyberattack is unlikely, two anonymous Facebook security team members cited by the NY Times have stated.Īn outage of this dimension occurring on the interconnected apps of a social media giant such as Facebook is extremely rare, security experts show. Since Facebook has acquired Instagram and Whatsapp, many have been clamoring that the social media giant to be broken up, and the recent outage and leaks only fueled those voices, showing that when a company holds so much influence over billions of users worldwide, tech decentralization and breaking up monopolies might not be such a bad idea after all.Īt the time of the outage, Antigone Davis, Director, Global Head of Safety at Facebook, was live on CNBC, defending the company against the recent whistleblower accusations, reports.
Haugen is set to testify in front of the US Congress. The breakdown follows a black start of the month for Facebook, as on Sunday former employee Frances Haugen (a data scientist) revealed herself on America’s 60 Minutes as the whistleblower who leaked “tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research” which showed that the social media giant only blocks about five percent of hate speech and less than one percent of violence and incitement and the company was aware that its products are fueling hate and harming young users` mental health.
Whatsapp down update#
Update – Breakdown comes amidst new whistleblower accusations against Facebook
Worldwide, tens of millions of users might be affected, experts have claimed. In Romania, the same website counts around 11,000 reports for the same 3 social media platforms owned by Facebook. In various places of the world, users have reported that other platforms are down as well, including T-Mobile, At&T, US Cellular, Amazon Web Services, or Google, among others.ĭownDetector is calling it a “widespread outage” and “rarely seen global outage,” with almost 130,000 reports for Facebook, 100,000 for Instagram, and 36,000 for WhatsApp in the US alone. Third-party apps that are using Facebook credentials for log-in are also experiencing issues. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Facebook shared on Twitter at 19:22. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.