Outage Brings Down All Facebook Social Networks

Facebook and its social media properties Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger all experienced outages over the weekend, with users around the world reporting problems.

According to a report in Mashable, users said they were having difficulties when using Facebook and Instagram, complaining of not being able to log into newsfeeds or make updates. The outages also prevented WhatsApp and Messenger from sending messages to users.

Citing DownDetector.com, which tracks outages of popular websites, Mashable reported tens of thousands of users said the apps were down in their areas. The reports started coming in around 6:30 a.m. EST over the weekend, with the outages appearing to last hours.

Facebook confirmed the outage in a statement to the news outlet, saying that “earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps. The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

The outage is the second one in recent months. In March, Facebook suffered one of its biggest outages affecting all of its properties that lasted more than 22 hours, having a large economic impact on the social media giant.

Despite the outages and scandals that have hurt Facebook’s reputation over the months, advertisers are still flocking to the company, as its user base and ad revenues continue to grow. Facebook said its total ad revenue grew 38 percent in 2018 to $55 billion, while net digital ad revenue in the whole country grew 36 percent to $23.66 billion, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, Facebook’s net digital ad revenue grew from 19.8 percent in 2017 to 21.8 percent in 2018 and is predicted to reach 22.9 percent by 2021. Also, Facebook’s monthly user base grew by 9 percent to 2.32 billion last year.

Tom Buontempo, president of social media agency Attention, said in a report at the time that brands might actually be spending more on the platform than before. “More of our clients are spending more across the Facebook ecosystem,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of options right now.”