Facebook Restores Services After Global Outage

Facebook has struggled to fully restore services after an outage began on Wednesday and continued into early Thursday.

The problem impact Facebook services around the world, and there also said to be intermittent problems when people tried to accessInstagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Last September all three of those platforms were impacted by a brief outage, which Facebook at the time blamed on a “networking issue.”

Facebook outage

According to Downdetector.com reports first began to emerge of problems accessing the service on Wednesday afternoon, peaking at 12,000 reports of problems.

It took until the early hours of Thursday morning before things settled down, almost 14 hours of outages.

Users typically reported problems trying to login, as well as issues with their newsfeeds. 30 percent said they experienced a total blackout.

The outage was global, with reports of service problems in both the United States, Europe and Japan.

Ironically, Facebook had to resort to using Twitter to announce the problems had been fixed.

It tweeted “Anddddd… we’re back” with a gif of Oprah Winfrey screaming.

Facebook has so far not offered any explanation as to the outage.

But the outage could likely hurt Facebook financially, as it makes most its money from adverts. There is speculation that Mark Zuckerberg’s firm may have to issues refunds for advertisers.

Facebook has been hit before by service outages. In January 2015 for example, Facebook blamed a technical fault, and not hackers, for an outage that downed its own site and those of several services it owns.

In November 2017 WhatsApp suffered a major outage after a problem prevented millions of people across the world from using the app.

WhatsApp also suffered another outage in May 2017, when a problem left people in many parts of the world unable to send or receive messages.

Troubled times

The outage comes amid a number of pressing problems for the firm.

Earlier this week a British government review recommended that competition laws need to be overhauled to tackle dominance of tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.

And one US presidential candidate in the United States, namely the Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, this week urged the forced breakup of tech giants like Facebook.

Facebook and others are also contending with moves to implement digital taxes around the world.

Tech firms have also been criticised for their data handling policies and not doing enough to help in the fight against terrorism.

Quiz: Think you know all about Facebook?