Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from outage ; facing an issue specifically when it comes to images.
In one of those rare instances, social media giant Facebook’s three most popular apps are reportedly down across the globe. Facebook’s instant messaging app WhatsApp and photo-sharing platform Instagram, as well as its social network Facebook are suffering from an outage and users seem to be facing an issue specifically when it comes to images. On Facebook, users are reporting issues of not being able to see thumbnail images of posts. While in WhatsApp, users are unable to download images that are being sent to them through their contacts. When trying to download images users a message saying, “Download failed: The download was unable to complete, please try again later.”
On Instagram, the Feed as well as Stories section is unable to new load images, but is showing posts that were seen by users before. While images simply failed to load on app, post show text saying “Image may contain: one or more people, cloud, sky, outdoor and closeup” on desktop.
According to the Down Detector, an independent website that tracks connectivity issues with major online platforms, many users have complained about the outage, across all three platforms in various parts of the world
Issues were particularly focused on the east coast of the US, according to the tracking website Down Detector. But they were reported across the world, with significant numbers of reports also coming from Europe, South America and East Asia.
Last time all three of Facebook's major services broke, the outage lasted for many hours. It later blamed that problem on a server issue that had a knock-on effect on Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook, since the three use shared infrastructure.
"As a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services," Facebook posted on Twitter after that previous outage was fixed. "We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience."
When those problems happened in March, they were said to be perhaps the biggest outage in the history of the internet, hitting millions of people.
“By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector, told Techcrunch in the wake of that outage. “Our systems processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we such a large scale outage.”
