Facebook and Instagram suffer global outages

Facebook has suffered the worst outage in history as global disruptions rocked the company for more than 12 hours.

Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps. Picture: AP /Jenny Kane.

Facebook has reportedly suffered the worst outage in history as global disruptions rocked the company for more than 12 hours.

Facebook said it was aware of outages on its sites including Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram but was working to resolve the issue.

From 4am AEDT in Thursday, users reported troubles with refreshing feeds or posting new material, according to Downdetector, a service that reports problems on applications and websites.

Facebook Messenger’s desktop version did not load — but the mobile app appeared to allow the sending of some messages.

Instagram back

By 5pm Thursday, Instagram was back, according to a Tweet form the social platform, but Facebook was still seemed to be down for some users across the globe, AAP reported.

“Anddddd … we’re back,” Instagram tweeted along with a GIF image of Oprah Winfrey screaming in excitement. Facebook did not provide an update.

During the day, users reported glitches with other kinds of content, such as images.

Downdetector show that Facebook received “increased error rates” as partial outages appear to affect the US, Central and South America, Europe and eastern Australia.

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

Some users are encountering a message that indicates the site is currently down for maintenance.

Facebook Down. In an era of 24 x 7 availability this is unprecendented. What is happening ? New features ? Bug fix ? Hacked ? Too much user Load ? # #facebookdown @facebook #whatwillwedo pic.twitter.com/mK7eYsRrWa

— Dr Dang (@Sudip88818336) March 13, 2019

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” Facebook said in a statement on Twitter.

We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

While the company hasn’t revealed what caused the outage, it ruled out it was because of a cyberattack known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

There are reports that Instagram, also owned by Facebook, is also experiencing technical difficulties.

The serious outage has been accompanied by more legal scrutiny of the social media giant’s opaque business practices, with Facebook facing a criminal investigation in the US over data sharing deals it forged with over 150 companies, including, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple.

According to the New York Times, a grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from a number of companies that entered into data sharing deal with Facebook.

The sharing deals, which have been phased out over the last two years, reportedly allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to virtually map all of the friends of a user without their consent and the likes of Amazon and Apple to harvest personal information.

Facebook is already under investigations by the US Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and two state agencies in New York, over the alleged sharing of data between it and UK-based data mining and analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.

The outage also comes a day after Google’s Gmail experienced global disruption, effecting North America, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

The outage reportedly affected users of workplace G-Suite accounts as well as regular Google accounts, which the company said was resolved by 5.45pm AEST.