Facebook Outage Lasts Hours

Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp all play a major role in contemporary society. Some rely on these platforms in order to communicate with family and friends, and others rely on them in order to make a living. Suffice to say, these applications, all of which are owned by Facebook, Inc., have cemented a major role in the lives of billions of people’s professional and personal lives. This makes the recent outage of the platform a major concern to those who deeply rely on Facebook and its related social media platforms.

The outage took place on Monday around noon and lasted for several hours. Users faced a number of challenges, including not being able to access new content on their accounts. These same issues were present on other social media platforms owned by Facebook, such as the ones named above. Users were unable to navigate effectively through these websites. The effect was not only felt by the user, but by Facebook’s own employees and staff who were unable to do their jobs throughout the outage. 

With the notability of the problem, many began to speculate the cause of the globe-spanning issue. It was a popular idea that hackers might be to blame for the issue. Facebook officials have since stated that this was not the case and that the issue actually came from inside the organization. The official statement detailed that the problem was due to an update that caused a cascading effect of other issues to the social media platforms’ internal framework. The issue was able to be resolved when a group of Facebook’s engineers were able to reboot the server that was experiencing the issue.

This is not the first time that Facebook has gone down for an extended period of time in the last few years. The outage on Monday still continues to cause concern even though it has been resolved. The issue continues to worry many for the possibility that it might happen again in the near future. If another outage like this occurs, it could be financially devastating to those businesses. Facebook itself lost millions in revenue as a result of this outage.   

An update posted from Facebook’s engineering team had this to say, “People and businesses around the world rely on us every day to stay connected. We understand the impact that outages like these have on people’s lives, as well as our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”