Instagram won’t refresh? Facebook isn’t loading the photo you’re dying to see? No, it’s not your connection—don’t break your phone. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are facing outages all over the globe. The outages are being reported as of Wednesday morning.
With hashtags #InstagramDown, #FacebookDown and #WhatsApp trending on Twitter, thousands of users have been reporting issues. The issues and bugs have been appearing on DownDetector, a website that offers a real-time overview of outages and bugs online. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all reflecting these issues on the site.
As seen from the snapshot above, outages have been interrupting many companies from Verizon to Twitter. Some companies are even giving back to their users. Instagram has released a statement and announced a giveaway for their users:
As you know, Instagram users recently experienced a downtime. Many users acrosss the globe experienced slowdowns and unstable connections and may experience them still. Ultimately, it is ourselves who are at fault if we can’t provide a stable service to our users worldwide. As such, we wanted to express an apology in an interesting way — by giving out free Bitcoin and Ethereum to our users.
Facebook Outages Show Image Tags
The outages on Facebook have given users an insight to what happens behind the scenes. Users are reporting images that aren’t loading. Furthermore, various tags are replacing the photos on the site. These tags have been assigned by Facebook’s “machine vision” machines. Some of the tags are including tags such as “image may contain: people smiling, people dancing, wedding and indoor”.
With Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp facing outages across the globe, who’s to blame? No news has been shared yet regarding the cause of this mess. All in all, the outages are certainly causing these companies to scramble.
In the end, while affecting thousands of users, this brings to light issues regarding reliability with many of these sites. It’s also important to think about what happens if Facebook’s new cryptocurrency Libra ever goes down. Some thoughts to consider while your favorite social platforms are down…
