On Wednesday, 3 July 2019, the world of social media was rocked by rolling ‘outages’ across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. According to DownDetector, thousands of businesses and individual users, from all around the world, were reporting issues regarding the platforms — with Europe and North America being the most impacted regions.
The apparent outages began around 1200 GMT on Wednesday afternoon. And it wasn’t long until social media users took to Twitter to 1) Express their outrage and 2) Confirm reports of the social media platform outages.
While the sites were not completely down, it’s important to note that some key functionality was temporarily unavailable:
- Facebook users reported being unable to load images or messages in messenger, and some were logged out of their accounts — and unable to log in again.
- Instagram users reported many posts appearing ‘blank’ or unable to load.
- Whatsapp users, who were arguably the worst affected, could not download images, videos or voice-notes sent in private or group conversations. They were also unable to view contacts’ status updates or upload status of their own.
Facebook, who also owns Instagram and Whatsapp, tweeted this statement: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #facebookdown”.
According to The Verge, Facebook claimed the outage was due to a ‘routine maintenance operation’ that lead to an error being triggered.
Functionality across all three sites has since been restored, unlike the faith of social media users. This news came after Facebook again took to Twitter: “Earlier today, some people and businesses experienced trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. This issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100 per cent for everyone. We’re sorry for any inconvenience”.
By Jenna Cook
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