Global outage hits Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger services
The services of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, which are affiliated with the Facebook Company, experienced a widespread global outage, Monday, while reports indicated that some Google, Amazon, and American telecommunications companies were affected.
Users had difficulty logging in to Facebook services, browsing their content, adding new posts to them, or operating the network’s messaging services through the WhatsApp and Messenger applications.
The reasons for the outage affecting users in many regions around the world were not immediately clear. Facebook said in a tweet on Twitter that it was aware that some users were having difficulty accessing its apps and services.
The company added that it was “working to get things back to normal as soon as possible.”
Mike Schreibfer, Facebook’s technical director, posted a tweet on Twitter apologizing to users for the interruption of Facebook services, noting that the company’s services “suffer from problems in communications networks, and the company’s teams are working to examine the problem, investigate its causes, and solve it as quickly as possible.”
Disruption of US telecom companies
Major US mobile service providers, such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-mobile, have also experienced malfunctions, as a large number of subscribers were unable to make phone calls, exchange text messages, or use the mobile Internet.
Users indicated that their phones work normally with wireless Internet networks (WiFi), but they are not able to connect to mobile networks.
No Cyber Attack
The New York Times quoted two workers in the Facebook security team as saying that it is unlikely that a cyber-attack was behind this widespread failure, and they pointed out that the systems through which these applications run are different, making it difficult for a hack to affect one of them all.
Reuters quoted security experts as saying that the malfunction may have been caused by an accidental technical glitch, without ruling out the “insider sabotage” scenario, which they said is theoretically possible.
A large proportion of Facebook users’ complaints were problems related to the difficulty of accessing many features on the Blue Network website, as well as difficulty logging in to their accounts.
Facebook stock losses.
The massive outage comes a day after a crisis rocked Facebook, after Frances Hogan, a former employee of the company; revealed thousands of internal documents that showed the social networking giant’s failure to protect users.
The outage exacerbated the losses of Facebook’s share, which fell by more than 5% during Monday’s trading, on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, after the repercussions of the statements of the former employee in the company, and in conjunction with a general decline in shares of technology companies.
