Facebook has come back online after an outage left Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus down for almost six hours.
The huge outage has been put down to “networking issues”, with users from around the globe being met with an error message when accessing the platforms.
With its own channels down, Facebook was forced to announce the outage via Twitter.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” the company said.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021
Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer apologised for the outage.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” he said.
While the outage was eventually resolved, Twitter did take the opportunity to engage with its newfound audience.
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1445078208190291973?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1445078208190291973%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F2021-10-05%2Fsocial-media-facebook-whatsapp-instagram-outages%2F100513696
The six-hour outage marks Facebook’s longest downtime since 2019, when it was down for nearly 24 hours.
It wasn’t just users impacted by the outage. According to The Verge, Facebook’s employees were struggling to communicate with one another, with internal systems also going down.
Facebook’s investors will also be feeling the effects of the outage, with the company’s share price tumbling nearly five per cent at the close of trading.
For company CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, this equated to an almost $US7 billion ($9.6 billion) loss in just a few hours.
Facebook has released a statement following the outage.
“To everyone who was affected by the outages on our platforms today: we’re sorry. We know billions of people and businesses around the world depend on our products and services to stay connected. We appreciate your patience as we come back online,” a Facebook spokesperson said.