Facebook Suffers Outage On Thanksgiving

Facebook and Instagram has blamed an issue with a “central software system” as being responsible for a six hour Thanksgiving outage of Facebook and Instagram in the US.

According to Downtector.com, problems with the services first began around 9.12am EST (2.12pm GMT) on Thursday morning. They were mostly resolved by 3pm EST (8pm GMT).

In April this year Facebook suffered a three hour outage, that also impacted Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram services. That was short compared to one of Facebook’s longest outages in March, with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp going offline for more than 24 hours.

Outage restored

This latest outage affected both Facebook and Instagram, but not reportedly WhatsApp.

The outage left some users in the United States unable to post photos or answer messages on Facebook or Instagram during part of Thanksgiving holiday Thursday.

This can be a peak period for these services, as family members share how they are celebrating that US holiday.

In an update just after 3pm EST the issue was fully resolved.

“We are back to 100 percent for everyone,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/28/tech/instagram-facebook-outage-thanksgiving/index.html

The company said earlier on Thursday afternoon that it had identified “an issue in one of our central software systems.”

Facebook said that it “caused many people to have trouble accessing Facebook’s family of apps,” and that it had started to restore access.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp also went offline for nearly a day in July.

Quiz: Think you know all about Facebook?