According to tracking sites, major social media services such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were struck by a big outage on Monday (4th October), potentially affecting tens of millions of users.
Power outage detector (Down detector) showed prominent outages in the heavily populated areas such as Paris and Washington where problems were being reported from 1545GMT. There were over 20,000 occurrences of people reporting problems with Facebook and Instagram, according to Down Detector.
According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Facebook services were disrupted globally owing to an outage. “Further details are being gathered,” stated a representative for the authority.
Users attempting to access Facebook in affected locations were presented with the following message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and will have it fixed as soon as possible.”
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.”
According to Reuters, all internal Facebook functions were unavailable. Employees lost access to several of their own tools during the shutdown, making Facebook’s response considerably more difficult.
Some people also faced issues while logging in to third-party applications such as Match Masters and Pokémon Go. Puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account, “If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal.”
Zuckerberg loses over $6b
Facebook’s stock price dropped more than 5% on Monday as all its services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went down for many hours throughout the world.
At 3.55 p.m. EDT, just before the Nasdaq closing bell, Facebook shares were trading at $325 per share. It fell 5.25 percent from its previous finish of $343.01 per share on Friday, according to official figures.
The market value of the company lost about $50.7 billion, Which was standing at $915.1 billion at the time, down from $965.8 billion on Friday
On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder, and CEO of Facebook saw his net worth drop $6.1 billion, or 5%, to $116.5 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List, where he is ranked 6th.
WhatsApp said on Twitter, “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp now. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”
WhatsApp also tweeted about its restoration on 5th October. It said, “Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day.”
Memes
People on Twitter did on Monday what they do best in a hard situation, and they started trolling Mark Zuckerberg by making memes of him.
The official accounts of McDonald’s, Twitter, and WhatsApp also trolled each other.
