Three major social and messaging services run by Facebook were down for hours on Monday as millions of people worldwide reported outages.
Users started reporting being unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp in the space of just half an hour, according to outage monitor Downdetector.
Nearly everyone unable to access Facebook’s platform said they had been trying to use the website, although some found the app was also down.
Instagram users reported outages widely across both the app and website versions. WhatsApp users were able to open the app but could not send or receive messages.
Aspects of the IT infrastructure they are based on have been integrated, meaning that problems are likely to affect all three at once.
People are likely to have difficulty logging into other services they have signed up for using their Facebook logins, such as Spotify and Tinder, while the outages continue.
Meanwhile, millions of stranded social media users in Nigeria and other parts of the world are currently on microblogging sites Twitter as Facebook-owned services, WhatsApp and Instagram, remain shut down for hours on Monday.
The social tools including Facebook’s own Messenger service were first reported as not being available from 04:25pm on Monday, leaving some three billion online users frustrated and unable to connect all over the world.
Users visiting the social platforms owned by Silicon Valley guru Mark Zuckerberg are confronted with error messages.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have since gone on Twitter to notify its billions of users that they are “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Also, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, Mike Schroepfe, tweeted, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Complaints posted by Twitter uses indicated people were experiencing outages in all corners of the world.
Error messages returned by Instagram’s website indicated the platform’s server was down.
Facebook’s official ‘platform status’ page, which tracks problems for developers, was also down, suggesting the problems may have been at the heart of Facebook’s servers.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to continue the integration of the three platforms in the coming months, with new features such as cross-app group chats between Instagram and Facebook Messenger in the pipeline.
Facebook’s full update statement said: ‘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.’
The Facebook-owned apps reported outages in March 2021 and July 2020 but both were resolved within an hour while Monday’s shutdown is entering a record five hours as of the time of filing this report.
Since the suspension of microblogging site Twitter by the Federal Government of Nigeria in June 2021, Nigerians have migrated heavily to Facebook-owned platforms for social interactions while a few others continue to tweet, circumventing the ban using Virtual Private Networks.
But Twitter experienced a record return on Monday as many stranded, social media-thirsty Nigerians bombarded the platform despite the current Twitter ban. Nigeria has about 33 million active social media users as of January 2021, according to Statista.
REPORTERS AT LARGE recalls that President Muhammadu Buhari during his nationwide broadcast to Nigerians to mark the nation’s 61st independence on Friday, had said he had directed a conditional lifting of the ban placed on the operations of the microblogging site.
