Facebook and its younger siblings, Instagram and WhatsApp were down yesterday with users not being able to post or view content.
According to Downdetector.com, which monitors websites, Facebook and Instagram experienced issues across a large portion of the US, Europe, South America and Asia.
While Facebook’s main page appeared to load, users reported not being able to post. Instagram users couldn’t refresh their feed and some had trouble posting images as well.
The exact reason for the interruption has not yet been made public, but Facebook and Instagram did confirm the outage ironically, through a tweet.
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
Anddddd… we’re back. pic.twitter.com/5E8UdlcsPJ
— Instagram (@instagram) March 14, 2019
The company put down rumours being posted on other social media sites which claimed the outages were a result of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, known as DDoS – a type of cyber-attack that involves flooding a specific site with extremely high volumes of traffic.
The last time Facebook had a problem of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users today, reported BBC.
Naturally, everyone took to Twitter to poke fun at this and the hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown were used more than 150,000 times.
Take a look at some of the hilarious reactions below:
Facebook and instagram users be like:#FacebookDown #Instagramdown pic.twitter.com/eK5UPCERSh
— KezComedy (@ComedyKez) March 13, 2019
When your job revolves around social media and both Facebook and Instagram go down at the same time, it’s quite the ride… #FacebookDown #InstagramDown pic.twitter.com/N1v3k7CnTI
— Jen McDonnell (@Jen_McDonnell) March 13, 2019
With #FacebookDown where do I go to support my crushing narcissism?
There’s no one to enjoy and appreciate my photos!
Who’ll validate my life!?! pic.twitter.com/n9t6RVssDV— Piefur (@Piefurrier) March 13, 2019
me attempting to do my very facebook-centric job when facebook is down… #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/YsHn5FXu3R
— Stephanie Baiocchi (@stephbaiocchi) March 13, 2019
The date is March 14th 2019. 24hrs after #facebookdown
Nobody remembers how to reach loved ones or eat food without posting updates and the global economy has collapsed.
The few Facebook users that migrated to twitter were among the lucky few to once again connect. pic.twitter.com/Q8OvfWc2uk— Elevator Thoughts (@Jonny_LDN) March 13, 2019
