Facebook, Instagram users affected in worldwide outage

SINGAPORE — Social media users around the globe experienced difficulties in accessing the Facebook family of applications — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — in what appears to be the most severe outage in the company’s history.

The cause of the interruption, which started in the early hours of Thursday (March 14) in the Republic, has not yet been made public.

Reports on Downdetector, a website for reporting problems on applications and websites, have ranged from troubles logging into accounts to the inability to post comments or photos.

Some users said they encountered a message saying that Facebook was down for maintenance, while other users reported not being able to post. Instagram users, meanwhile, were unable to refresh feeds or post new material.

Facebook Messenger users reported that their desktop versions could not load, but the mobile app appeared to allow the sending of some messages. There also seemed to be glitches with content such as images. Users of WhatsApp, Facebook's other messaging app, said they faced similar problems.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook said in a statement.

"We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

The company added that the outages were not a result of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, known as DDoS — a type of cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic.

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150 million users — compared to around the 2.3 billion monthly users it has today. AGENCIES