Much of the Western world went into panic Wednesday and into Thursday when Facebook, the social networking platform used by billions worldwide, went down. The crash affected WhatsApp and Instagram as well.Users around the globe found logging-in impossible. In Israel, users could access Facebook normally by late Wednesday night, although many features – such as posting for some users – were unavailable.
BBC news called it “the most severe outage in its history” noting the last time Facebook service was disrupted on such a scale was in 2008.
Facebook Inc. struggled to restore its services fully on Thursday after the 17-hour partial outage made the social network inaccessible to users across the globe, driving a wave of online complaints.The number of reports on the crowd-sourced DownDetector website – one of the Internet’s most used sources of numbers on outages – peaked at just over 12,000, gradually falling to a couple of hundreds by early Thursday.But with thousands of users complaining on Twitter under the hashtag #facebookdown, a number of media reports put the number affected in the millions.Facebook representatives took to Twitter to update users on the problems.
A Facebook spokesman, asked by Reuters for more details, would only repeat the company’s initial statement on the outage on Wednesday, saying that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps were down for much of Wednesday, although the photo-sharing social network said it was back up early on Thursday. Facebook was yet to provide an update on its other services.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