Users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp across the world reported problems accessing the platforms on the morning of Sunday, April 14.
Outages were reported starting at around 6:30 a.m. EDT, with Facebook and Instagram both inaccessible for at least several hours.
Downdector.com has
received more than 11,000 reports of problems since 7 a.m. ET on Sunday.
Many users took to Twitter to say that they were having issues.
Sunday’s outages came just a month after Facebook
experienced its worst outage ever.
Prior Outages
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were all inaccessible for around six hours in March.
“We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution,”
Facebook wrote, adding that it was “investigating.”
The company wrote in a tweet later that it was trying to resolve the issue “as soon as possible,” confirming that the outage “is not related to a DDoS attack.”
According to AdAge, advertisers were also locked out of Facebook’s ad manager.
“On Wednesday, Facebook Ads Manager, the lifeblood of advertising, was out of order, along with the rest of the platform. Ads Manager is the self-serve advertising website that millions of marketers use to schedule their campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger,” according to the
website.
It noted that Facebook manages some $90 million in ad revenue per day.
Facebook finally gave the all clear about 24 hours later. The company blamed a “server configuration change,” and apologized for the outages.
Last August, Facebook
went down for about 45 minutes, which was described as a relatively lengthy outage for the firm.
Earlier, in 2010, Facebook experienced a 2.5-hour outage that at the time the company
called its “worst outage we’ve had in over four years.”
“The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition,” the company
announced. “An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.”
Twitter Jokes
For most of the morning, the hashtags #FacebookDown, #InstagramDown, and #WhatsAppDown were featured prominently in Twitter’s trending section.
