Communication outage as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp experience global network failures
It seemed like a return to the analogue age Monday as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suffered global network failures.
On Twitter, Facebook communications executive, Andy Stone, 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.
Outage tracking site Down Detector logged tens of thousands of reports for each of the services. Facebook’s own site would not load at all for about an hour yesterday; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but could not load new content or send messages.
The reason for the outage was not immediately clear. However, multiple security experts said it might be a Domain Name System problem.
Yet some IT experts suggested it could have been as a result of technical flaws to do with where the data is stored.
“But I know that they have resolved the issue so what they need to do is send the patch to the users that have been impacted, especially enterprise customers,” one IT expert said.
He said the development underscored the need for hybrid data storage in the cloud.
Shares in Facebook are continuing to slump as it suffers outrages and accusations that it prioritises “profit over safety”.
The outages come after a Facebook whistleblower, 37-year old data scientist Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager on the company’s civic misinformation team, accused the social media giant over the weekend of putting “profit over safety” of its users.
