Social media platforms see an increase in the number of people reporting problems
Many users of Instagram and Facebook were unable to log in on Friday, days after a major outage.
The Independent was informed by a spokesperson for Facebook that the company owns both apps: “We are aware that some people have difficulty accessing our apps. We are working quickly to restore normalcy and apologize for any inconvenience.
DownDetector, an online website tracker, showed that there was a significant spike in complaints about Instagram at 3:00 ET on Friday. Around 2,000 people reported not being able to access Facebook.
Many people took to Twitter to voice frustration and complain about the app access issues. This outage occurred on Monday, which was a social media crisis that saw Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all shut down for over six hours.
These three apps, which are all owned and operated on shared infrastructure by Facebook, stopped working on Monday just before 5 PM UK time.
Facebook’s biggest outage in history was caused when a wrong command was issued, resulting in what the social media giant called “an error of their own making”.
“We have done extensive work to secure our systems against unauthorised access. It was fascinating to see how this hardening slowed down us as we tried to recover an outage not caused by malicious activity but by an error of our making,” said a company post on Tuesday.
Santosh Janardhan (Facebook’s vice president for engineering and infrastructure) apologised for the “people and businesses around world who depend on” him. He also said that the company was aware of the “impact outages like this have on people’s daily lives and that it is our responsibility to inform people about any disruptions to our services.”
It also pledged to learn more about the past and how it can be prevented in the future.
