FACEBOOK OUTAGE LEAVES TENS OF MILLIONS IN LIMBO
TENS of millions of users of Facebook and Instagram struggled to access the social media platforms yesterday in what appeared to be a massive outage of parent company Meta’s platforms.
The two platforms are widely used in Zimbabwe and across the world.
People trying to log onto the websites and apps were finding error messages and were unable to refresh their feeds as normal.
Tracking website Downdetector indicated more than 300 000 reports of outages for Facebook, while there were more than 20 000 reports for Instagram.
Multiple countries around the world were affected.
“We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” Meta said.
Andy Stone, the director of communications for Meta, said in an X post, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
In the United States, the outage had more significance because yesterday was Super Tuesday, one of the most important days in the elections for the US President.
At around 9 am Eastern Time in the United
States, hundreds of thousands of users reported Facebook being down during one of the biggest election days of the year.
Many users were reporting being logged out of Facebook accounts with no ability to log back in.
In October 2021, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to apologise for the “disruption” caused after its social media services went down for almost six hours — impacting more than 3.5bn users worldwide.
The billionaire said sorry after an internal technical issue took Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram offline.
The scramble to bring it back online eventually succeeded after six hours.
For hours, billions of people found themselves without the social media tools they relied upon to keep in touch with friends and family.
Others reportedly found they could not access services which required a Facebook login.
Meanwhile, businesses around the world, which use social media to connect with customers, were faced with the prospect of an unexpected financial hit.
Mr Zuckerberg himself was thought to have lost an estimated US$6bn from his personal fortune at one point as Facebook shares plummeted, according to the business website Fortune’s tracking software.