Suddenly, my WhatsApp messages ain’t delivering, I quickly call a friend to know what’s up and he’s experiencing the same. I hop on the internet only to find out not just WhatsApp, but Facebook and Instagram are down globally.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram experienced this same problem in July this year and the issue was resolved within 24 hours.
According to Reuters, security experts tracking the situation said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
Facebook acknowledges doing everything possible to quickly resolve the situation.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook wrote in a tweet.
Earlier today, Facebook experienced a 5.5% decline in shares, with its almost 2,000,000,000 daily active users reducing in numbers. The media platform also received accusations of prioritising profit over public welfare, an undesirable day for the globally leveraged platform.
In a report by Downdetector, a tracker of outages that collates status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, revealed that there were over 50,000 incidents, which may be more, of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.
According to the report, over 35,000 users experience the same for WhatsApp and about 9,800 users experienced the same for Messenger.
Beyond these social networking platforms, individuals who use their Facebook passwords and usernames to log in to other apps such as Pokemon Go, Match Masters, among others experienced the same issue.
“If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal,” Match Masters, a puzzle game app, wrote on its Twitter account.