Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services began returning online Monday (early Tuesday morning in the Gulf and Middle East regions) after it faced a large-scale outage of its dominant social network for seven hours.
Facebook struggled to end an hours-long outage that potentially hit tens of millions of users across its platforms.
Tracker Downdetector said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first popping up around 1545 GMT (7.45pm UAE time). Roughly seven hours later, the services began returning online.
“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now,” Facebook said in a tweet late Monday afternoon in Silicon Valley.
Facebook had “reconnected to the global internet” as of 2228 GMT but it was expected to take a bit of time to get the social network’s family of services back running smoothly, web security company Cloudflare said in a blog post.
Facebook has not communicated on the possible cause of the outage, but cyber security experts noted they had found signs that online routes that lead people to the social giant were disrupted.
“Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates,” tweeted John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer at Cloudflare.
During the outage, Mike Schroepfer, the company’s chief technology officer, tweeted his “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now.”
Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas during the outage were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
Facebook has pushed back hard against the outrage regarding its practices and impact, but this is just the latest crisis to hit the business.
Facebook’s family of apps was hit by a massive outage on Monday, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.
Outage tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington and Paris, with problems being reported from around 1545 GMT or 7.45pm UAE time.
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
Social media users in the Gulf countries, including the UAE, were also heavily affected. Users from India also complained about the inaccessibility of the social media websites.
Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone had said on Twitter.