By now we already know that Facebook apps are down. This is because the social media giant is a leading voice in social media interactions. Billions of people across the globe use Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram – and deservedly so because Facebook has been very tactical about its need to be at the top of the social media world.
UPDATE ON THE FIX: Facebook is now up for some people.
UPDATE ON THE FIX: Instagram is now up for some people.
UPDATE ON THE FIX: WhatsApp is now up for some people.
UPDATE ON THE FIX: Cloudflare reports that the BGP problem affecting Facebook has been fixed – the apps and platforms are on their way to being restored.
UPDATE ON THE CAUSE OF THE OUTAGE: A Routine BGP update went wrong.
UPDATE 1: DiscloseTV is a no context aggregator and its tweet(which we’ve removed) is spreading misinformation as the data was scraped and not hacked – it’s even more likely a scam. Read more here.
UPDATE 2: Facebook has sent a small team to its data servers in California to try and manually reset its servers in an attempt to fix the problem.
UPDATE 3: The outage has affected internal communications at Facebook and its workers have resorted to using other platforms like FaceTime and Discord
WhatsApp is used widely because of its simplicity, and while there are superior apps, people have remained loyal to WhatsApp because it arrived here first.
You can say the same for Instagram too.
Now, it wouldn’t surprise you that Jack Dorsey is poking fun at Facebook and its associated apps on Twitter because what else can he do when his platform is the only one that is actively and authoritatively online?
In an attempt to assure their users that things are being fixed, Facebook apps are using their Twitter handles to pass that information. This is also a unique time because it marks a period the social media platform can co-exist, all banter included.
In an attempt to aggravate Facebook apps – for which WhatsApp flatly took the bait – CEO Jack Dorsey made fun of WhatsApp encryption:
In another case, it allegedly appears that someone has a hold of Facebook’s domain name for sale. And Jack wants to buy it:
And that is not all: there are unsubstantiated rumours going around that hackers have gotten access to Facebook user data, and are selling the same on the dark web. Take this with a pinch of salt because it is yet to be established.
This is also the first time that Facebook apps have been down for the first time, with an outage extending for more than three hours.
What is happening?
Developing…
