Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users suffer worldwide outage, shares down 1.30%

Facebook users worldwide faced loading or technical issues such as logging in or posting Facebook posts on the social media platform on Wednesday. The technical outage was also found in the firm’s other popular services such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

At around 3.45am, New York time, Facebook’s shares were 1.30% lower in pre-market trading, down by US$2.26, at S$171.11. The tech stock had closed Wednesday’s session higher by 0.84%, at US$173.37.

In a tweet acknowledging the outage on Wednesday, Facebook said it was 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,’ the social media company said.

The tweet garnered 46,000 likes, 20,000 retweets, and 11,000 comments in under 14 hours.

The firm later gave an update to say that the problem was not due to a DDoS attack, or a distributed denial-of-service attack, which is a cyber attack where a hacker disrupts the services of the host by making the network unavailable to its users.

Technical glitch affected users globally

According to Downdetector, an app which monitors over 4,400 services in 32 countries and provides realtime overview on issues and outages, user reports on technical problems with Facebook reached over 12,000 globally.

The Downdetector map showed Facebook service problems in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States.

Users reported varied problems, from not being able to load the website to being unable to post comments. Separately Facebook’s Instagram app also showed some glitches, including not being able to view captions in posts while social messaging service WhatsApp denied the uploading of photos in chats.

Technical glitches on Facebook are not uncommon. In November, the social media platform faced an outage on its tool for advertisers when businesses were trying to post adverts for the Black Friday weekend.