Facebook, Instagram Experience Hours-Long Outage Affecting Users Worldwide

Facebook family of apps, including Instagram, suffered worldwide outage that started around Wednesday afternoon Eastern time. The problem was also reported across other platforms such as Messenger and WhatsApp and has been going on for hours, one of the longest outages the Mark Zuckerberg-owned apps experienced.

Not A DDoS Attack

It's not yet clear what caused the issue. However, rumors of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack circulated after the outage started.

Later on, Facebook quickly took to Twitter to inform users that it's working on a fix and confirmed that the global outage wasn't caused by a DDoS attack.

The issue seems to be different for every user. Some reported seeing error messages and "required maintenance" notifications upon opening the affected apps, while others say the apps load for them, albeit having limited functions such as not being able to like posts, add comments, and upload photos.

According to Downdetector, a site that shows issues and outages of online services, 47 percent of users experienced total blackout during the outage's peak. Affected areas included parts of Asia, Europe, South and Central America, and United States.

At the time of writing, the most reported problems are log-in and newsfeed issues at 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively. A live outage map is also available in Downdetector's website.

People Turn To Twitter

Though it's not the first time Facebook experienced having server issues around the world, it may be one of the longest outages for the Zuckerberg group of apps, lasting for hours.

Naturally, most people turned to Twitter to check out if they're not the only ones experiencing the issue. As expected, everyone went ahead and made jokes about it.