Facebook appears to be recovering from a more than 14-hour disruption to all of its products that left them mostly inaccessible across the world.
The company’s main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were all affected.
Facebook has yet to offer an explanation for the outage.
The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users today.
The problems began yesterday afternoon, and only showed real signs of recovery this morning. They meant core platforms many people rely on every day to communicate were rendered mostly useless.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” Facebook said in a statement, posted on Twitter.
“We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.” assuring Facebook users that it was not a DDos attack
Facebook’s apps seemed to be recovering on Thursday morning, with Instagram announcing it was back.
In response to rumors posted on other social networks, the company said the outages were not a result of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, known as DDoS – a type of cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic.
The Extent Of The Outage
Estimates suggest the issue began around 16:00 GMT on Wednesday. While Facebook’s main service appeared to load, users reported not being able to post.
Instagram users were not able to refresh feeds or post new material. Facebook Messenger’s desktop version did not load – but the mobile app appeared to allow the sending of some messages; however, users reported glitches with other kinds of content, such as images. WhatsApp, Facebook’s other messaging app, had similar problems.
A third-party outage map suggested the problem was global. Here is the map
Most Affected Companies
Ongoing issues are likely to hit Facebook hard in the wallet. The company, which funds the majority of its business through advertising revenue, told Bloomberg that it was investigating “the possibility of refunds for advertisers”.
The issue also affected Facebook Workplace, the service used by businesses to communicate internally.
Buenos Aires-based designer Rebecca Brooker told the BBC the interruption was having a significant impact on her firm’s work.
Other big organizations that rely on Facebook services were affected by the outage
On Wednesday’s issue, Ms. Brooker added on Twitter: “Look at what happens when we let one company control everything.
“I figured this could happen eventually but it’s extremely crippling to be part of this monopoly.”