Facebook struggles into day 2 of global outage

Facebook Inc on Thursday struggled to restore its services fully after a 17hour partial outage made the world’s largest social network inaccessible to users across the globe, driving a wave of online complaints.

The number of reports on the crowd-sourced Down Detector website, one of the internet’s most used sources of numbers on outages, peaked at just over 12,000, gradually falling to a couple of hundreds.

However, with thousands of users complaining on Twitter under the hashtag #facebookdown, a number of media reports put the number affected in the millions.

The BBC and a handful of other media outlets said it was the platform’s longest ever outage, while Facebook representatives took to Twitter to update users on the problems.

A Facebook spokesman, asked by Reuters for more details, would only repeat the company’s initial statement on the outage on Wednesday, saying that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps were down for much of Wednesday, although the photosharing social network said it was back up early on Thursday.

Facebook was yet to provide an update on its other services.

“We’re back,’’ Instagram tweeted here along with a GIF image of Oprah Winfrey screaming in excitement. (Reuters/NAN)