Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp return to normal after massive drop
The connection problems in the three networks of the same company began this Wednesday afternoon and have lasted until early Thursday.
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have registered this Wednesday since five o'clock in the afternoon a partial crash of their service around the world for hours, both in its desktop web version and in its applications, as reported by their users from Outage Report and Downdetector (websites that measure activity on the Internet). This has been confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg's own company when he explained on Twitter that it was not due to an attack: "We are aware of the situation. The biggest connection problems lasted until early Thursday, when the incidences of these three networks have dropped and returned almost to their usual levels, according to Outage Report and Downdetector.
The connection difficulties began to be noticed shortly before five o'clock in the afternoon (Spanish mainland time), and had an impact in a large part of Europe, America, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. In contrast to other occasions, it was not a complete block, but affected users could still access the applications, but only with old content. Functions such as sharing content or sending and receiving messages ceased to provide service. The latter only remained available on WhatsApp.
In the case of Instagram, a platform owned by Facebook, users suffered problems when not able to connect from the mobile application in 32% of cases, followed by the inability to upload photos, which affected 24% of reports, according to Outage Report. In addition to writing private messages, problems have focused on the publication of new content and the "stories" section. Around six o'clock in the morning (Spanish main time), the social network announced through its Twitter account that it had solved the technical problems, twelve hours after the first bugs were recorded.
In the case of Facebook, one of the most affected functions was its private messaging service, Messenger (which has its own mobile application). "Facebook is not available at the moment because we are performing maintenance tasks. Try logging into your account in a few minutes," you could read in a message when trying to access the web version. Facebook, Messenger and Instagram worked for hours at half gas. WhatsApp (from the same company) also experienced problems with uploading photos and audios. Something that according to the users was increasing throughout Wednesday.
The searches that grew the most during the Google crashes include queries on all services, including the instant messaging application: "WhatsApp won't let me send photos. Global trends on Twitter (Trending Topic) included #FacebookDown and #WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook has pointed out that the failure is not related to a "DDoS" cyberattack, which occurs when servers are overwhelmed by an unmanageable avalanche of connection demands. The network with 2.3 billion active users had a notable drop in November, attributed to a "server problem," and another in September, on that occasion due to "network problems.
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