Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down in global outage

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down in global outage
Reuters | Mon, October 4, 2021, 10:03 AM


(Reuters) -Facebook Inc's main social media site, popular photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, were down for tens of thousands of users, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the services. However, the error message on Facebook's webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," the social media giant's official Twitter handle said https://twitter.com/Facebook/status/1445061804636479493 on Monday.

"We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." The official handles of WhatsApp and Instagram also took to Twitter to confirm the outage.

Facebook shares fell 5.5% in afternoon trading on Monday, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.

Meanwhile, the social-media giant's instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.

Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.

Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.

"If your game isn't running as usual please note that there's been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal," puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account

Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion in Hours as Facebook Plunges
Scott Carpenter | Bloomberg
Mon, October 4, 2021, 12:09 PM

(Bloomberg) -- Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.

A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since Sept. 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.

On Sept. 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public. The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.

In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.

“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.

Yesterday I posted to FB an image I made with JWildfire.

Could...
Could there be something to this "death fractal" nonsense after all?

Yikes.

Vitriol wrote:

Yesterday I posted to FB an image I made with JWildfire.

Could...
Could there be something to this "death fractal" nonsense after all?

Yikes.

Anything's possible in this mad, mad world.

Q:
How do I know if my account information was in the 1.5 billion users scraped off of Facebook's database?

A:
Those emails claiming to be from a hacker who infiltrated your computer and recorded you masturbating to questionable porn will now include your name, address, and phone number to finally appear somewhat legit.

Vitriol wrote:

Q:
How do I know if my account information was in the 1.5 billion users scraped off of Facebook's database?

A:
Those emails claiming to be from a hacker who infiltrated your computer and recorded you masturbating to questionable porn will now include your name, address, and phone number to finally appear somewhat legit.

For the clueless among you (Temple for example) that have no idea what a fractal is,
visit Vitriols' Deviant Art page for images and info.

https://www.deviantart.com/dbvitriol


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Facebook apologises as services including Instagram hit again
Published, 11 hours ago | BBC

Facebook has apologised after again reporting problems with its services, days after a major outage hit WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook for hours.

The company said that a "configuration change" had impacted users globally.

It added that the incident was not related to the outage that saw its products taken offline for over six hours earlier this week.

Its Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Workplace products had been affected, it said.

"We're so sorry if you weren't able to access our products during the last couple of hours," the company said it a statement on Friday evening. "We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue - thanks again for your patience this week."

Earlier, web monitoring group Downdetector said that for a relatively short period of time on Friday there was an avalanche of messages from users reporting problems with Instagram.

Some of them immediately took to Twitter and other social media platforms to complain about the second Instagram disruption and share memes on the issue.

On Monday, Facebook - which owns WhatsApp and Instagram - blamed an internal technical issue for the major outage which not only affected the firm's services, but also employees' work passes and email.

The services were down from about 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday.