Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp Down For 10 Hours; Facebook Suffers Its Worst Outage In History

Since yesterday night, the world’s three of the biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are down.

Although this outage is not for everyone, as the unavailability of being reported in pockets across Asia, US, Europe and elsewhere, this is Facebook’s worst outage in history.

What exactly has happened? It is DDoS attack?

Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram Not Opening

You are not alone if you are not able to open Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp. This is a severe global outage, hailed as the worst downtime in Facebook’s entire history.

The outage has now extended to 10+ hours, and thousands of users are reporting either complete unavailablity of these apps/website or some of the features not working.

Interestingly, both Facebook and Instagram took the shelter of Twitter to announce that something is wrong indeed, and the outage is for real.

Facebook tweeted:

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

Instagram also tweeted:

We’re aware of an issue impacting people’s access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP.

— Instagram (@instagram) March 13, 2019

Downdetector has confirmed Whatsapp’s outage, and you can check the map of live updates.

Facebook owned Oculus VR is also facing outage, and users are not able to open it.

Facebook has posted an update on the Developer Status page as well.

What Are The Major Errors Which Users Are Getting?

• The most severe is when the user is not able to login to Facebook or Instagram. The user id/password is not being accepted, and some error messages are showing.
• In case the app or website opens, critical functionalities are missing. For instance, some Instagram users reported that they are not able to upload pics.
• Instagram stories are not loading for some users; and their feed remains unpopulated.
• On Messenger as well, users said that they are not able to share images.
• Some Whatsapp users from Paraguay, India, Bangladesh, Argentina claimed that they are not able to send messages and receive messages
• On Whatsapp, some users are not able to place video calls, and open old chats.
• DownDetector has reported that Whatsapp outage is mainly in New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; and the Philippines.
• One Oculus VR user said, “Nobody can log in to any multiplayer games purchased through the Oculus store. They also can’t access their Oculus Home environments.”
• #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown were trending on Twitter

 

Is This DDoS Attack?

Very unlikely. Facebook’s servers are strong enough to handle even the biggest, most fiercest DDoS attack, as they have servers managing more than billion users.

Hackers would need incredible server power to launch a DDoS attack on Facebook or Whatsapp, Instagram.

Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president at network security firm ThousandEyes said, “A Facebook, a Google—those kinds of companies—are so massive, and their bandwidth and interconnectivity is so huge, that they can effectively absorb large-scale attacks on their own. And they undoubtedly have architected their internet connectivity to do just that.”

Wired has said that the downtime can be a result of “routine maintenance gone awry to a Domain Name System issue.”

We will keep you updated, as more details come in.