Facebook returns after long worldwide outage

Along with WhatsApp and Instagram, social media network Facebook has returned after its longest worldwide outage yet.

The outage affected not just the billions of users around the world who make use of the platform, it also affected employees at the company located in Menlo Park. For many people whose businesses rely on Facebook-owned services, there was no other option but to use Twitter, TikTok, Telegram and alternative social networks.

Facebook released the following message on Twitter:

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.

— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021

Hours earlier, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said also on Twitter that FB was facing network problems.

“Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible

— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

Access to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp started to return slowly at around 6:30 p.m. EST.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology as well: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

Today’s outage came after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen identified herself as the whistleblower last night on CBS’ 60 Minutes. She stated Facebook is not being honest “about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation,” according to a CBS News post (Archive). “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” Haugen told Scott Pelley. She also stated that Facebook betrayed “democracy” after allowing the algorithm to distribute misinformation to its users during the 2020 presidential election.

[Source]: AP: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage – [Archive].