Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram now back online!

 Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are coming after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says. All three services are owned by Facebook and will not be accessed over the net or on smartphone apps. Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it had been the biggest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports round the world. 

Previous Issues For The Social Media Giants

The last time Facebook had a pause of this magnitude was in 2019. The services went down at about 16:00 GMT with users starting to gain access to the sites at around 22:00. Facebook tweeted its apologies to those stricken by the outage. The social media giant's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said it's going to take your time for Facebook's services to "get to 100%". Instagram and WhatsApp also confirmed that their services were getting down to come back to up and running in statements on Twitter. Users flood Twitter with jibes 

A number of other users also reported problems using Facebook's video game headset platform, Oculus, and apps which require Facebook logins were affected, including Pokémon Go. An outage of this scale for such an extended time is rare. The disruption in 2019 left Facebook and its other apps mostly inaccessible across the planet for over 14 hours. As yet there has been no official reason given for the matter. But online network experts speculated it's going to involve a slip-up with DNS, or the name system, for Facebook sites. 

DNS is commonly compared to an address book or phone book for the net, pointing web browsers to the pc system which serves the web site they're trying to find. Previous issues with DNS led to widespread outages of several major sites earlier this year. In one amongst those instances, it emerged that the blackout was caused by one customer of a widely-used service who changed their settings, triggering a software bug affecting an enormous number of internet sites. 

Time To Poke Fun?

Several other tech companies, including Reddit and Twitter, poked fun at the social media giant's predicament - prompting responses from the affected apps. The disruption comes the day after an interview with a former Facebook employee who leaked documents about the corporate. Frances Haugen told CBS news on Sunday that the corporate had prioritised "growth over safety". On Tuesday she's going to testify before a Senate subcommittee in an exceedingly hearing titled "Protecting Kids Online", about the company's research into Instagram's effect on the mental state of young users.