On Monday, Facebook suffered its worst outage since 2008. Hopefully, Facebook, Instagram, as well as WhatsApp are once again accessible, more than six hours after users first reported a major outage that took the service offline on Monday. A network monitoring service called ThousandEyes said in an email that the outage was the result of DNS failure.
But some users are still reporting problems posting new content to Instagram. The social media giant did not disclose what went wrong. Platforms mentioned above stopped working shortly before noon ET. The websites, as well as apps for Facebook’s services, were responding with server errors. It was not clear how many users were unable to access the apps.
The incident marked the longest stretch of downtime for the world’s most popular social media platform since 2008. During the incident that took place in 2008, technical problems affected about 80 million users. Currently, Facebook has 3 billion users, so the scale of the problem is different.
Facebook, its employees, and the latest scandal
The company’s employees, as well as contractors, complained on Monday that they were unable to log on to their work accounts during Facebook’s worst service outage since 2008. The incident not only made it impossible for the company’s 3 billion-plus users to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it also affected internal systems for employees.
Concretely, they said the outage was preventing them from accessing the tools they use to track information. Employees were also unable to access internal chat functions. Even engineers who were tasked with helping resolve service issues were not able to log on and get involved to fix the problems.
Facebook’s worst service outage came a day after Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the whistleblower behind the documents cited by WSJ. The Wall Street Journal gained access to numerous internal documents thanks to Facebook’s former product manager. She previously worked as a product manager at Pinterest, Yelp, as well as Google. According to Haugen, she left Facebook in May. The company’s former product manager copied and released tens of thousands of pages of documents.
The documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal contain many interesting details about Facebook. They revealed that the company executives were aware of the negative impacts of its platforms on some young users.
