After a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp reopened early Tuesday in Bangladesh.
Facebook apologized but did not immediately explain what caused the failure, the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.
Facebook’s services, which include consumer apps like Instagram, workplace tools it sells to businesses, and internal programs, went dark on Monday around 9:35 p.m. Around 3:30 a.m., access began to be restored.
Soon after the outage began, Facebook acknowledged that users were having difficulty accessing its apps, but did not provide any details about the nature of the problem or the number of users affected.
The error message on the Facebook web page indicates an error in the Domain Name System. Which allows web addresses to direct users to their destination. In July, a similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc knocked out multiple websites.
Impact
The outage was the social media giant’s second setback in as many days. Previously, a whistleblower accused on Sunday that the company had repeatedly prioritized profit over cracking down on hate speech and misinformation.
As the world flocked to rival apps like Twitter and TikTok, Facebook shares fell 4.9%. This is their biggest daily drop since last November, due to a bigger sell-off in tech stocks on Monday. Following the resumption of service, shares gained about half a percent in after-hours trading.
“I’m sorry to every small and large business, family, and the individual who relies on us,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get back to 100 percent.”
On Monday, Twitter reported higher-than-normal usage, which caused some issues with people accessing posts and direct messages.
In one of the day’s most popular tweets, Netflix shared a meme from its new hit show “Squid Game” captioned “When Instagram & Facebook are down,” which showed a person labeled “Twitter” holding up a character labeled “everyone” on the verge of falling.
Massive blow for Facebook Inc.
After service returned that “lots of people searched today ‘how to run google ads for clients,'” one member wisecracked in a Facebook group for ad buyers.
According to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index, Facebook, the world’s second-largest seller of online ads after Google, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage.
However, the previous downtime at internet companies had a little long-term impact on revenue growth.
Frances Haugen, a product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, revealed on Sunday that she was the whistleblower who provided documents supporting a recent Wall Street Journal investigation and a US Senate hearing last week on Instagram’s harm to teens girls.
According to prepared testimony seen by Reuters, Haugen was scheduled to testify before the same Senate subcommittee on Tuesday, urging it to regulate the company, which she plans to compare to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking was harmful to health.
