Facebook, Instagram face worldwide outage for half an hour

The outage at Facebook, which started around 0600 GMT, appeared to spill over and temporarily slow or block traffic to other major internet sites, according to web and mobile user reports from around

Social networking website Facebook and photo-sharing platform Instagram encountered technical issues on Tuesday morning that stopped millions of users across the world from accessing these websites for close to 30 minutes. While a few media reports claimed this was due to a cyber attack, Facebook, which has close to 109 million users in India, stated this happened because of internal technical glitches.

“Many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third-party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” the

US-based social networking giant said in a statement. “We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 per cent for everyone.”

Users trying to log into Facebook on Tuesday morning repeatedly received a web page saying “sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” Even as users from most parts of the world took to social media against the outage, a Facebook India spokesperson said the company was in the process of assessing how many geographies were affected. According to reports, the outage affected the US, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

All the services of Facebook and Instagram have since been restored.

The incident comes weeks after a technical glitch caused most Indian users to log out of Twitter. The microblogging website, which has around 33 million active users in India, had said the outage was caused due to a “bug in our front-end code”, which it later said was patched.

The hashtag #facebookdown was among top trends worldwide for most of Tuesday, with over 175,000 posts about this on Twitter. Hundreds of users flooded Twitter with trolls about “dealing with no Facebook”, referring to an addiction of social media. “Keep calm, it’s just a #facebookdown not a mental breakdown,” ?@nab33nn posted on Twitter, reacting to users complaining about the glitch.

American news network, CNN, shared on its website the sentiment of social media: “For about an hour this morning, humans across the world were briefly forced to interact with each other in person... Facebook and Instagram went down, leaving millions of users around the world briefly unable to post selfies or humblebrag.”