Facebook, Whatsapp, And Instagram Restore Services After Widespread Outage
On April 14 2019, a multitude of users faced issues while connecting to popular social media website, Facebook. The connection issues were not limited to Facebook, however, because Instagram and Whatsapp users were confronted with similar problems. This is not the first case when Facebook services have been down for a long time. Previously, in the month of March 2019, Instagram and Facebook faced a global outage that lasted for a long period of time (more than 24 hours). This time, the outage lasted for a shorter duration, but questions were still raised regarding Facebook’s vulnerability to external attacks.
Facebook’s spokesman stated that the company is acknowledging the issue faced by users and that all steps are being taken to resolve the issue. Apologizing for the inconvenience, the spokesman refused to divulge the cause of the outage. Rumours are floating around, which state that the reason for the outage of Facebook services was most likely a DDoS (Denial of Service) Attack. In a Denial of Service attack, multiple network nodes try to disrupt the server by accessing it at the same time.
Downdetector Reports
Downdetector.com indicated that at the peak time, over 12,000 users reported issues with Facebook connectivity throughout the world. Regarding other applications, Instagram had an outage count of over 7,000 users, whereas Whatsapp peaked at 3,000 user reports. The live outage map on the website clearly exhibited that the majority of issues arose from the Asian and European continental regions.
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Considering the popularity of the social media website, a downtime of even a few minutes is a cause of issue amongst its users, and when this happens on a regular basis, it turns into a matter of concern. A lot of people in the US did not face a similar issue, which hints towards the fact that maybe the Asian and European data centres for the company were attacked or disrupted because of some reason. Users may still face outages in the future, but as of now, the issue has been resolved as per the company.
