ISLAMABAD: Facebook and its affiliated apps including Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram stopped working for many users around the world here on Wednesday, March 13.
As a result of the hours-long outages, people complained of being unable to login, share pictures or post anything. According to outage-tracking site downdetector, 36% of the people affected were unable to login, 33% were able to access their newsfeeds and 30% people experienced total blackout.
The blackout started happening in the afternoon Eastern time, ET, and continued to persist till late night affecting major part of USA, Australia, Asia and Western Europe.
However, it is not clear if the issue has been completely resolved. US media outlets also noted that the social media giant was unable to confirm if the issue had been fixed.
Many people took to twitter to talk about the outages using hashtag #Facebookfamilycrisis and #facebookisdown. A quick assessment of the twitter hashtags revealed that some users, who had earlier experienced outages, were able to use the apps by midnight ET time.
Some people speculated that the problems in the Facebook apps was owing to a possible cyber attack. However, Facebook took to twitter and denied that this was due to a cyber attack.
We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
Meanwhile, USA Today talked to an engineer Roland Dobbins to understand the possible reason of this blackout. He underscored that the digital disruption could be owing to “an accidental traffic jam issue with a European internet company that collided with Facebook and other websites.” However, the company has yet to confirm the exact cause of the outages.
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