#Global whatsapp outage series#

#Global whatsapp outage series#

In a series of articles, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) newspaper reported that Facebook knew its Instagram platform caused some teenagers, particularly girls, to feel bad about their self-image. The outage came with Facebook under mounting pressure in the US, after a leaked internal investigation showed the social media giant was aware of how its Instagram app harmed the mental health of teenagers. “My bet is that someone pushed a button wrong, or a cord got unplugged, which seems very minor but the reality is that we’ve seen these things before where suddenly something is configured incorrectly and entire swaths of the internet are not available,” Sherr said. Ian Sherr, editor-at-large at CNET, told Al Jazeera earlier that judging by early reporting and the error messages users received on Monday, it was most likely that something had been “configured incorrectly”. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies took down multiple websites in July.ĭowndetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” The message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error, Reuters reported.ĭNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. The error message appearing on throughout the day read: “Sorry, something went wrong. “This is obviously very concerning,” Fisher added about Monday’s problem. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” the company said.Īl Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from Washington, DC, said the outage was much longer than a 2019 shutdown of Facebook-owned apps that lasted for about an hour and which WhatsApp said at that time “was caused by technical problems”. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.įacebook later blamed faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the outage. We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. “We know that people were unable to use to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today - a humbling reminder of how much people and organizations rely on our app every day,” Cathcart wrote in the tweet. On Tuesday morning, WhatsApp head William Cathcart also took to Twitter to announce that the service was “back up and running” but did not elaborate on what might have caused the problems. Service were not restored until several hours later in what Downdetector described as “the largest outage we’ve ever seen”. Outage tracking website said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first appearing at about 15:45 GMT. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now.” “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said. In a post on rival platform Twitter on Monday evening, Facebook confirmed its apps were coming back online and apologised to users for a blackout that affected millions of people across the world.

Facebook, Instagram and the widely-used WhatsApp messaging service are gradually returning to normal after an hours-long global outage that disabled the Facebook-owned social media platforms for some six hours.