Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger have experienced another hiccup, leaving users around the world in a state of digital disarray. The outage, which began around 5:30 PM GMT (1:30 PM EST), seems to affect specific features of these apps1. This incident follows a recent major outage for the company, which has recently rebranded itself as Meta1.
The impact of such outages can be significant, considering that more than 100 billion messages are exchanged across Facebook’s suite of apps daily. Last year, Facebook introduced an update that allowed Messenger users to send messages to Instagram users without requiring them to download the other app, and vice versa. While this integration is convenient, it also means that any outage affecting one messaging service is likely to affect the other12.
In response to the current situation, Meta issued an apology and stated that they are working to restore normalcy as quickly as possible. The previous outage in early October was attributed to configuration changes in their data centers, which also impacted internal tools and systems1.
Let’s hope that the digital threads connecting us soon regain their strength, allowing us to resume our virtual conversations and connections! 🌐📱🤝