A day without Facebook: Outage hits social media giant Monday
An unexpected and massive outage of Facebook, Instagram and other social media apps threw the online world into disarray on Monday, limiting access to information, news and entertainment to users in the Mother Lode and beyond.
“This isn’t uncommon for the platforms to go down, but to have them down for this long and have them both down is interesting,” said Tiffany Phillips, Tuolumne County-based social media marketing specialist. “On days like this, if there was an emergency road closure or a fire that maybe Cal Fire or county government or federal government wanted to announce, they wouldn’t be able to get that message across on those platforms. They would have to use other platforms… It’s a huge loss to not be able to reach people during these times.”
About 9 a.m. Pacific time on Monday morning, Facebook and the family of apps it owns, — including Instagram, Messenger and Oculus (a virtual reality service) — were unreachable, unloadable and inactive.
They appeared to be slowly returning a little after 3 p.m.
The reason for the outage was not immediately known.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook posted on its Twitter page during the outage. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,”
Just after 3:30 p.m. Monday, the tech behemoth posted an update in the message thread.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us,” the tweet said.
Local public safety officials said that the pages utilized by their agencies were inoperable, but downplayed the severity of the more-limited means of disseminating public information.
“If we need to release something right away, we would reach out to the local media agencies such as yourself,” said Sgt. Robert Nikiforuk, a spokesman for the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office.
Emily Kilgore, fire prevention specialist with the Cal Fire TuolumneCalaveras Unit, noted a variety of
other means by which information was shared with the public.
“Our ability to convey information to the public is not impeded by the social media outage as we work with local media outlets (radio, newspaper, TV, etc...), send press releases via email and, for imminent danger situations, the sheriff’s offices in each county have their respective emergency notification systems,” Kilgore said in an email. “The public should be utilizing and prepared to receive information in a variety of ways as listed above.”
On the whole, the social media outage has not seemed to limit the normal operations of the agencies. The sites are more frequently used, sometimes daily, to update the public about notable public safety happenings — arrests, threats and natural disasters — sometimes after, and sometimes during their occurrence.
“We do on occasion rely on social media platforms such as Facebook to help push out public safety announcements or to seek the community’s assistance with solving crimes,” Sonora Police Chief Turu Vanderwiel said.
Nikiforuk said the Sheriff’s Office sometimes used social media for investigative purposes, but with it down, it also limited potential investigative leads from being posted.
“We would simply wait for the platforms to be brought back up so we could gather whatever information we were looking for regarding an investigation,” he said.
Phillips received the news of the outage on Monday morning from a few different social media marketing networks while she was in a yoga class. They advised answering emails or other forms of content creation while the outage was sorted out.
Normally, Phillips would have prepared invoices on Monday, but because she finished them last week, she planned to use social media sites for some of her clients’ content creation.
Phillips, who works on average with between 25 and 30 clients on consulting and social media management in the public, private and non-profit sectors, said there is a relatively small audience in the foothills, with an older-trending user base relying more on Facebook and Instagram than Twitter, whose user base skews to more urban regions.
She said the Summerville Bears Quarterback Club was a “great example of how word spreads” in Tuolumne County, citing a Facebook event post about the Westside Brewfest reaching a few thousand people in a few days. Other locally based pages, she said, reach between 20,000 and 3,000 people a month over Facebook. (She said she did not typically release information about specific clients and their data.)
Phillips noted the platforms were “going through a lot of changes right now,” related to criticism about user interfacing, increased consumer privacy and misinformation.
“There’s also been a huge increase of Instagram users locally in Tuolumne County in the last few years,” she said. “The two have such a different user experience.”
Social media users will often seek out a few platforms to use, she said, but not all, depending on what kind of information or entertainment they’re seeking. Business owners or public agencies will use social media to reach out to customers or users to sell, inform and engage, she added, though those platforms’ social media business functions can be glitchy or temperamental based on a constantly changing landscape of regulations or user behaviors.
There is still no doubt though that their use is widespread.
Estimates of Facebook usage range from 2.7 billion to 2.9 billion monthly active users. Twitter, by comparison, has about 330 million users.
As the outage simmered on Monday, Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer with Facebook, also offered “sincere apologies” to everyone affected.
“We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible,” he said.
The outage sent the company’s stock price tumbling about 5% on Monday and wiping billions from the assets of Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg.
Buzzfeed News reported that the outages may have been caused by a server configuration issue, and CNN referred to it as a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer.
On the Facebook home page accessed from a computer desktop, an admonition appeared which said, “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
The outage apparently sent users over to Twitter, a microblogging social media site, which posted on its page, “hello literally everyone.”
Later in the day, the hashtag #Internetshutdown was also trending, with some users claiming additional social media sites and internet services were down as well.
Nikiforuk said he did not have any reports of internet outages in Tuolumne County as of about 1:45 p.m.
Vanderwiel added that internet outages presented a greater problem when they occurred because some of their databases operated from it.
“That being said, when technology fails, we are able to utilize manual processes that have been in existence for many years,” he said.
Jim Kimberly, director of corporate communications at AT&T, also acknowledged the social media outage in an email to The Union Democrat.
“That may cause some customers to believe they are having a problem with network connectivity,” he said. “Our network is operating normally.”
By the afternoon, Twitter had become a hotbed of speculation and memeing, with some ridiculing Facebook, others seeking to know the reason for the outage, and others alleging it as a facet of a larger conspiracy.
In the last weeks and months, Facebook has faced renewed scrutiny after news reports revealed the Menlo Park-based social media giant has information linking Instagram use with depression in teenage girls. It has faced ongoing criticism for apparent election meddling during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections on its platform and for ineffectively regulating COVID-19 misinformation.
Antigone Davis, global head of safety with Facebook, testified on Thursday in front of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer-protection panel.
On Tuesday, a whistleblower named Frances Haugen was set to testify before Congress about her claims that Facebook “[magnified] hate and misinformation” in order to prioritize profits, according to the Associated Press.
Some have even blamed the public release of the Pandora Papers, the largest ever leak of documents revealing shadowy financial dealings and tax havens for the global political oligarchy, on Sunday.