According to Down Detector, the outage affected users in the US, Europe, South America, Australia and Asia. Moreover, users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp were having trouble sending photos on the app. Virtual reality company Oculus, also owned by Facebook, reported that its users were having trouble accessing and using its platform as well.
This isn't Facebook's first outage. In November the social network crashed due to a test the company itself was running. That breakdown lasted about 40 minutes. That same month, Facebook and Instagram were down for hours because of what Facebook said was a server configuration. This is, however, probably the biggest outage in Facebook's history. The previous record-holding outage occurred in 2008, when Facebook had just 125 million users (now it has more than 2.3 billion users, and Instagram has more than 1 billion).
In the mean time, messaging platform Telegram claims to have experienced a boom in signups during Facebook's downtime. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov’s just wrote: "I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours."
So far, Facebook hasn't confirmed what caused the outages. In a statement, a network intelligence company called ThousandEyes said the issue appears to be internal, rather than a network or Internet delivery issue. "For example, we saw '500 internal server errors' from Facebook. Given the sheer scale and continuous changes that these web scale providers are constantly making to their applications and infrastructure, sometimes things break as a result of these changes, even in the most capable hands," wrote ThousandEyes VP of product marketing Alex Henthorn-Iwane.
