13 March, 2019. If you can’t post a new status on Facebook, it’s not you.
Facebook and Facebook-owned photo app Instagram have been down for some users on Wednesday for more than eight hours. The social networks have been having issues since around 9 a.m. PT, according to tracking site Down Detecter. Some users have posted on Twitter that they’re seeing a message saying Facebook is “down for maintenance.”
Facebook Down. In an era of 24 x 7 availability this is unprecendented. What is happening ? New features ? Bug fix ? Hacked ?
Other users trying to post status updates on Facebook, including CNET staff, got error messages saying “something went wrong.”
Facebook confirmed the outages.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an email. “We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
The outage affected users in the US, Europe, South America, Australia and Asia, according to a map by Down Detector. Users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp were also reporting that they were having trouble sending photos on the app. Virtual reality company Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, also reported that its users were having trouble accessing and using its platform.
Facebook, which makes money from selling ads, was having issues with its ad products as well.
We’re also aware that people are experiencing issues with access to our ads interfaces, we’ll share an update as soon as possible. https://t.co/Wk4STxGuEq
— Rob Leathern (@robleathern) March 13, 2019
Facebook hasn’t revealed what caused the outage, but it said in a tweet Wednesday that it wasn’t because of a cyberattack known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack where hackers try to crash a site by flooding it with too much traffic.
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.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
This isn’t Facebook’s first outage. In November the social network went down in a mishap caused by a test the company was running. That outage lasted about 40 minutes. That same month, Facebook and Instagram were down for hours because of what Facebook said was a server configuration.
Source: Cnet.com
