It’s been a rough week for Facebook, and it seems that Friday afternoon had no mercy for the tech giant. After one of their longest outages in company history on Monday, Facebook went down again on Friday afternoon. The outage affected all Facebook properties, including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
ut oh pic.twitter.com/NqA3xpWKsN
— Matt Navarra (I quit X. Follow me on Threads) (@MattNavarra) October 8, 2021
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” the company posted on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Instagram tweeted a similar statement, evoking distressed “This Is Fine” vibes with its emoji choice (🥲 ).
We know some of you may be having some issues using Instagram right now (🥲). We’re so sorry and are working as quickly as possible to fix.
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 8, 2021
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It doesn’t seem that the outage lasted long, as services were back up and running for some less than 30 minutes after Facebook tweeted about it. But after this week’s more serious outage, the repeated lapse might spark concerns about the reliability and safety of the app. Repeated outages are especially concerning for small business owners who use Facebook’s tools to communicate with customers, or international users who use WhatsApp as their primary texting app.
Monday’s outage was caused by configuration changes to the routers in Facebook’s data centers. Facebook told TechCrunch that today’s outage was also due to configuration changes, which impacted people globally, but that it was unrelated to Monday’s downtime.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are slowly returning. Why did they disappear to begin with?
“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours. We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. Instagram also posted on Twitter that the issue is now fixed, thanking users for their memes this week.
