A worldwide social media blackout was caused on Monday evening due to Facebook’s services all going down, with these including the main app Facebook, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The applications went down at around 17:30 (local time), and they were back up – albeit at a very slow speed – at around midnight.
While we are yet to hear an official reason for the outage, Facebook’s communications executive, Andy Stone, was the first to acknowledge the blackout through an update on Twitter, saying that the company is aware of the issues and that it is working to fix them.
Just a few minutes later, Facebook’s official Twitter account acknowledged that users were having some trouble accessing several of the company’s apps and products.
The statement read “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 apologise for any inconvenience.”
A similar statement was also shared on WhatsApp’s Twitter account just a few minutes earlier than Facebook’s tweet.
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.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Once the outage headed into its fourth hour, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer provided an update on matters, also apologising and saying that “teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible”.
*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
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Later on, Facebook tweeted an apology to “the huge community of people and businesses around the world” that depend on the company, with them stating they have been “working hard to restore access” to their apps and services, with them “coming back online now”.
As previously mentioned, none of the Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp accounts have explained what caused the outage, leading to widespread speculation and analysis on matters.
Many have agreed that this was not a hack or a directed cyberattack, with a source telling the New York Times that ‘one hack was unlikely to affect so many apps at once’.
Reports claim that the company’s network paths to the outside web seemingly just disappeared without any form of explanation.
How badly did the social media outage affect you?
Let us know over on our socials (since they are finally available again!) 😅
