Second Outage Hits Facebook in One Week

By Staff, Agencies

Facebook has acknowledged that its users around the world again had problems accessing its services for hours due to a tweak of its system, just days after a massive outage caused in a similar fashion.

“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours,” a Facebook spokesperson told the AFP news agency about 21:30 GMT on Friday.

“We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”

Website trouble tracker DownDetector showed spikes in reports of problems accessing or using Facebook and its photo-centric Instagram network, as well as Messenger and WhatsApp starting about three hours earlier.

Facebook attributed the trouble to a configuration change at its computing platform and said that it affected users of the social network and Instagram, Messenger and Workplace globally.

People flocked to Twitter to voice frustration.

“What’s up with Instagram?” read a tweet that included a picture of cartoon character Bart Simpson sitting in a corner in apparent punishment.

“It’s not even 4 days and it’s already down again.”

“Problems with Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp AGAIN!” read a lament in a DownDetector chat forum.

Another user posted on Twitter, “Looks like Facebook went to a 3-day work week. Monday and Friday shutdowns?”

Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world’s reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.