On June 3, millions of users across the world faced inconvenience after the three major social media platforms, Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram experienced a global outage.
After the glitch was resolved on July 4, a Facebook spokesperson clarified that the problem occurred due to a routine maintenance operation, which accidentally triggered a bug and made it difficult for users to upload images, videos.
Long Global Outage
People took to Twitter to complain about their failure of sharing or downloading images, videos and voice messages across all three platforms.
The hashtags #instagramdown and #Facebookdown became one of the top trending topics on Twitter on July 3.
While people in large numbers began to rant on Twitter about the global outage, Twitter’s DM delivery and notifications also began to malfunction. However, Twitter Support was quick to fix the issue.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, about 14,000 users reported issues with Instagram, while more than 7,500 and 1,600 users complained about Facebook and WhatsApp. The widespread server bug was active for almost 9 hours, preventing individuals from downloading content shared with them.
While in some parts of the world, users were able to exchange text messages on Whatsapp, users in Scotland and Zimbabwe confirmed that the app had frozen entirely in Europe and the US.
In a statement, Facebook confirmed that there was a problem with its apps, and it was “working as quickly as possible” to fix it.
On June 3, at 9 pm, Facebook put out a statement on Twitter. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos or other files on our apps. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, ” the statement read.
Facebook, a platform that generates millions of dollars in revenue from advertisements, denied refund requests from the businesses that incurred losses.
Instagram, with an approximate user base of 111 million, also confirmed the global malfunction in a tweet. “We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing their Instagram accounts. We are working quickly to fix the issue,” it said.
The technical glitch on Instagram came a day after the failure of Cloudflare, a content-delivery and security services provider, which led to several websites and services to be inaccessible.
After nearly three hours, Instagram tweeted to inform that the services have been restored. “We are now fully recovered and apologise for the disruption!” it said.
Cloudflare Blames ‘Bad Software’
Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp were not the only ones facing trouble yesterday. Twitter reported issues with direct messages for a few users.
Earlier this week, Cloudflare issues resulted in the failure of many websites.
Many internet users complained of “502 Bad Gateway” notices on several sites. This was a result of Cloudflare experiencing some major outages, as reported by the company’s System Status page.
Cloudflare addressed the issue soon. “Cloudflare has implemented a fix for this issue and is currently monitoring the results. We will update the status once the issue is resolved, ” the company informed.
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