Facebook posted a message last night to its official Twitter account and apologized for the global outage saying the “issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100 percent for everyone. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.” Instagram similarly said its issues were more or less resolved, too.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had problems loading images, videos, and other data across its apps yesterday, leaving some people unable to load photos in the Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, or send messages in WhatsApp. Facebook said earlier today it was aware of the issues and was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.” It blamed the outage on an error that was triggered during a “routine maintenance operation.”
The issues started yesterday evening and began slowly clearing up after a couple hours, according to DownDetector, which monitors website and app issues. The errors aren’t affecting all images; many pictures on Facebook and Instagram still load, but others are appearing blank. DownDetector has also received reports of people being unable to load messages in Facebook Messenger.
The outage persisted throughout the evening and night, with Facebook releasing a second statement, where it apologized “for any inconvenience.” Facebook’s platform status website still lists a “partial outage,” with a note saying that the company is “working on a fix that will go out shortly.”
All services should be back to normal now as Facebook services have become critical for business and communications, and every hour they’re offline or acting strange can mean real inconveniences or lost money.
