Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suffered major outages today, with reports indicating that images and videos were not loading, which impacted users in the U.S. and Europe.
DownDetector, a platform which tracks website issues in real-time, recorded a huge spike in problems across some of the biggest social networking platforms in the world. A slew of users took to Twitter to voice their frustrations with the bugs and glitches—and it’s not the first major outage this week.
“Can’t view any pictures on Messenger and I can’t attach or see any pics in anything on my news feed, comments and posts,” one person complained on DownDetector, discussing Facebook. Another person added: “No pictures are loading, and I can’t generate preview pictures on links.”
A Facebook spokesperson told Newsweek the company was working to resolve the issues. “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble uploading images, videos and other files on our apps. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” a short statement read.
For a website dedicated to image-sharing, Instagram was left unusable according to some comments. “Can’t see certain posts or post anything new! ANNOYING! Please fix this!” one user fumed. Another added: “Not working. Loaded the image, was available for five minutes, people commented and then ‘can’t see… can’t load’ and cannot see posts of other people.” Similar bugs appeared to hit popular chat service WhatsApp.
Facebook owns all three platforms. It appears mobile apps are less affected.
On Twitter, popular social media commentator Matt Navarra highlighted the issues in a series of updates, explaining that the widespread outages appeared to be hitting the East Coast. He noted: “It’s going to be so awesome when Facebook finishes integrating Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms.” With Facebook gone, the last-standing social network was quickly over-run over with jokes and memes.
The companies have not yet commented on the reason behind the issues. Luckily, outages with major social media platforms are unlikely to last long and normal service should soon be resumed.
Last Friday, workplace chat application Slack suffered a major outage as users reported that messages were repeating and showing up several times after being sent. Yesterday, a bug in hosting platform Cloudflare impacted a slew of websites on the internet after it was offline for about 30 minutes.
Source: Newsweek
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