Guardian (UK): Facebook, Instagram And WhatsApp Hit By Media Messaging Outage

Facebook said its apps and platforms were “back at 100%” Wednesday evening after outages throughout the day, though some users said they were still experiencing issues.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were malfunctioning throughout most of the day on Wednesday and into the night. The company said it was working to resolve issues faced by some users while sending media files on its social media platforms and messaging services.

More than 14,000 users reported issues with Instagram, while more than 7,500 and 1,600 users reported issues with Facebook and WhatsApp, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The website’s live outage map showed that the issues mainly cropped up in parts of Europe and the United States.

Many angered users posted on the rival platform Twitter to highlight the problem, which seems to be preventing images and videos from loading properly.

But Twitter, too, had technical difficulties. The platform said it was “struggling with some issues with DMs and notifications”.

Facebook said it was working to resolve the error as the hashtag #instagramdown began to climb up the trending list on Twitter.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

On WhatsApp, some users noticed image, audio, and video files were not able to send, while others on Instagram claimed they could not see images on their feeds. Users on the Facebook Messenger app also reported being unable to load or send images and videos.

The outages on Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp came as Facebook is reportedly merging the three messaging platforms. Facebook’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, made plans to rewrite the basic software of these apps to allow them to be interoperable, the New York Times reported in January.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the rewrite was related to Wednesday’s service disruption, but said in a statement to reporters the issue was triggered “during one of [its] routine maintenance operations”.

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“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook said.

Facebook has more than 2.3 billion monthly active users and Instagram has 1 billion. Facebook experienced one of its longest outages in March, when some users around the globe faced trouble accessing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for over 24 hours.

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