In what appears to be another major outage for Facebook, thousands of its users are reporting problems on Friday afternoon. This would be the second time in a week that the world’s biggest social network hasn’t been able to keep its shit together.
At the moment, DownDetector shows Facebook and Instagram seem to be having the most trouble with about 34,000 users filing reports that the latter platform is down in the last hour. WhatsApp and Messenger are also experiencing an uptick in incident reports.
As they did on Monday, Facebook users took to Twitter to voice their frustration (relief?) that they can’t get their hungry eyeballs on some posts.
The companies services appear to be working for most Gizmodo staffers, but at least one West Coast-based staffer found Instagram to be inaccessible.
In response to our request for comment, a Facebook spokesperson shared the following statement: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Facebook’s network-wide outage earlier this week was one of the most disastrous technical screwups it’s encountered since it first launched in 2004. The company is estimated to have lost around $60 million in revenue during the six hours that engineers scrambled to get its services back online, and its stock price took a brief $47.3 billion hit to its market cap.
The massive outage was found to be tied to a “faulty configuration change” to an obscure but very important routing protocol known as Border Gateway Protocol or BGP. In a nutshell, BGP helps the far-flung system of networks that make up the overall network of the internet decide where to route traffic. The web infrastructure giant explained in a blog post on Friday how Facebook going down put extreme pressure on other networks just to keep their head above water as users were chaotically re-routed around the web.
More importantly, people who live in countries that rely heavily on WhatsApp found themselves cut off from the internet entirely, putting a spotlight on the outsized power the social giant wields with little oversight.
This is a developing story...