Facebook suffers biggest outage to date
Just over 14 Hours of intermittent outages has affected over 2 Billion users worldwide. Issues such as being unable to post new statuses and send photo messages to friends have been prevalent in what can be seen as Facebook’s worst outage ever.
Facebook confirmed that the outage was NOT as a result of any DDoS Attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) - Although, the reason isn’t clear as to what caused the ongoing issues. The social media giant did state there were delays in some API requests across their platforms, however very little updates were provided throughout the night. Then again, it is always going to be the first assumption that hackers have caused the downtime, considering Facebook and Instagram have over 3 Billion users between them.
The issues have given rise to a smaller social media firm - Telegram, who gained over 3 Million new users during the outage, which clearly exemplifies the impatience of users and their growing reliance of social media. Businesses will want to sue Facebook as they will have lost thousands in potential advertising revenue, most notably the fairly new “Facebook Workplace” extension of the app will have caused severe disruption for many global businesses.
Rebecca Brooker, a Buenos Aires-based designer said in a BBC Article that she was severely affected, stating, “Facebook for personal use is fine - but what happens when we rely on large companies such as (Facebook) to provide business services?”
It just goes to show that even the biggest and best companies can’t fix problems instantly, and as a result, over half of social media activity in the last 24 hours has been halted…
Written by Harrison Jones,