We Were All Free of Facebook's Iron Grip on the Internet for a Few Hours

[steven36]

 

Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp experienced widespread outages on Sunday for the second time in the past month (and the third time this year), with issues reported starting at around 6:30 a.m. ET and extending until around 9:00 a.m. ET.

 

Per Bloomberg, Facebook and Instagram domains ceased to be accessible by users during that time period, while Messenger and WhatsApp were also non-functional. In a statement to the news agency, the company offered few details:

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Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps. The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

 

 

Users worldwide appeared to be impacted, with Bloomberg noting that Twitter users everywhere from the U.S. to Israel and Thailand were complaining about the outage.

 

The last time this happened in mid-March, Facebook blamed a “server configuration change” that resulted in an unprecedented, cascading series of issues persisting for over 24 hours. As the New York Times noted, even the platform’s bug reporting system became inaccessible, a black eye for a service that (at least in theory) is never supposed to go down.

 

This incident is nowhere near as bad: outage-monitoring service DownDetector listed reports peaking in the tens of thousands on Sunday, while it listed millions of reports during the mid-March outage.

 

More at [Bloomberg]

 

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