Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp return to normal after suffering a massive fall | Technology
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have registered this Wednesday from five in the afternoon (Spanish peninsular time) a partial drop in worldwide service for hours, both in its desktop web version and in its applications, as reported its users from Outage Report and Downdetector (websites that measure the activity on the Internet). This has been confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg's own company, explaining from Twitter that it was not due to an attack: "We are aware of the situation". The biggest connection problems have lasted until the first hour of this Thursday, when the incidences of these three networks have dropped and returned almost to their usual levels, according to Outage Report and Downdetector. The service has gradually returned to normal after midnight (Spanish peninsular time).
The difficulties of connection began to be noticed shortly before five o'clock in the afternoon (Spanish peninsular time), and had an impact on a large part of Europe, America, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. Unlike other occasions, it was not a complete block, but affected users could still access the applications, but only with old content. Functions such as sharing content or sending and receiving messages stopped giving service. The latter only remained available on WhatsApp.
In the case of Instagram, platform that is owned by Facebook, users suffered problems when they could not connect from the mobile application in 32% of cases, followed by the impossibility of uploading photographs, which affected 24% of the reports, according to Outage Report. Thes problems have focused, in addition to writing private messages, on the publication of new content and the "stories" section. About six in the morning (Spanish peninsular time), the social network has announced through its Twitter account that it had solved the technical problems, twelve hours after the first failures were recorded.
We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to DDoS attack.
- Facebook Facebook) March 13, 2019
In the case of Facebook, one of the most affected functions was its private messaging service, Messenger (which has its own mobile application). "Facebook is not available at this time because we are performing maintenance tasks, try to enter your account in a few minutes", you could read in a message when trying to access the web version. Facebook, Messenger and Instagram worked for half-hourly hours. Operating problems were also noticed in WhatsApp (from the same company) with the upload of photographs and audios. Something that according to the users was increasing throughout Wednesday.
The searches that grew the most during the crashes in Google include queries about all services, including the instant messaging application: "WhatsApp will not let me send photos". Among the global trends in Twitter (Trending Topic) stood out #FacebookDown (Fallen Facebook, in English) and #WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram.
Google search trends in the last 24 hours.
Facebook has specified that the failure is not related to a cyber attack type "DDoS", that is, "denial of service attack", which occurs when servers are overwhelmed by an unmanageable avalanche of demand for connections. The network with 2,300 million active users had a noticeable fall in November, attributed to a "server problem", and another in September, on that occasion due to "network problems".
