The world faced a social media blackout intermittently for a few hours on Wednesday after Facebook went down along with glitches in Whatsapp and Instagram. The cause of the imminent interruption of the services has not yet been made public.
Facebook’s apps were so useless to an extent that it had to provide updates via the only platform it doesn’t own: Twitter. Facebook acknowledged the outage in a tweet Wednesday, saying, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
It later confirmed the problem was not the result of a DDoS attack, which refers to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack in which a hacker cripples a site by overloading it with fake traffic.
The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008 when the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users today.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings