The social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are experiencing an outrageous outages network problem around the world, including Uganda as of Wednesday evening. The outages appear to be connected to US cybersecurity firm Cloudflare.
Currently WhatsApp users are not able to download any media including videos, pictures and audio files. On Facebook, if you browse through your uploaded photos, instead of seeing holiday snaps or pictures of food and friends, you’ll be shown text saying things like “image may contain: people smiling, people dancing, wedding and indoor” or just “image may contain: cat.”
Facebook says it is aware of the issues and “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
All the three platforms are down, from facebook and not showing some images and to he issues on Whatsapp. So its a general problem for facebook apps pic.twitter.com/Poei7T1X0U
— Northfly Uganda (@Northfly2) July 3, 2019
Apps and websites are always going to experience occasional disruptions due to the complexity of services they’re offering. But even when they’re brief, they can become a real problem due to the huge number of users many of these services have.
A Facebook outage affects a suite of popular apps, and those apps collectively have billions of users who rely on them. That’s a big deal when those services have become critical for business and communications, and every hour they’re offline or acting strange can mean real inconveniences or lost money.
In a related incident, Cloudflare has been responsible for downtime on several websites across the globe the past week, including BuzzFeed, Medium, Soundcloud and Canva.
The firm said the issues it is experiencing is not related to a cyber-attack. Downdetector.com showed that the platforms were particularly hard hit in Europe and the East Coast of the United States.
The first outage for today’s issues were reported shortly before 16:00 EAT.
READ ABOUT: How to Switch from GBWhatsApp to WhatsApp without losing your chats
Instagram outages reported across the world at 17:00 (screenshot, Downdetector.com)
WhatsApp outages reported across the world at 17:00 (screenshot, Downdetector.com)
Users reported that the issues on the social media platforms, all owned and operated by Facebook, appear to be limited only to specific parts of the sites. Users, for example on WhatsApp report that they’re not able to download images and videos from chats to their devices.
This is a developing story.
