On Wednesday, Facebook’s services were down for close to a day.
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On Wednesday 13th, Facebook’s services were inaccessible for close to a day. Millions of users noticed they were unable to login on Facebook or Instagram or send messages with Messenger or WhatsApp. This outage affected users all over the world and lasted some 14 hours, the longest Facebook has been down in a long-time.
As per usual, users turned to the other only option, Twitter, to post their complaints. Facebook themselves used their rival social network to inform users they were aware of the outage and working to try and resolve it.
Some speculated the social network was under “attack” (DDoS, distributed denial of service), although the giant quickly denied this claim.
Even now, the company hasn’t provided a proper explication concerning the outage, only mentioning the problem happened due to a configuration issue on one of their servers.
Surprisingly, at the same time as Facebook’s services were experiencing issues, Google’s services were also partially down, with users unable to access certain features of Gmail, Google Drive or even YouTube.
As per usual, when one service is down, users will try to find something else to do, while said services come back up. Twitter surely saw an increase in users and activity temporarily, but other sites also saw more traffic than usual. As an example, and as some should have seen it coming, the popular site Pornhub reported an increase in visitors of around 20%.
