Facebook says ‘working’ to resolve outages across its platforms
Facebook has had problems loading images, videos, and other
data across its apps today, leaving some people unable to load photos in the
Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, or send messages in WhatsApp.
Facebook says it is aware of the issues and “working to get things back to
normal as quickly as possible.”
The issues started around 8AM ET and now appear to be
clearing up, according to DownDetector, which monitors website and app issues.
The errors aren’t affecting all images; many pictures on Facebook and Instagram
still load, but others are appearing blank. DownDetector has also received
reports of people being unable to load messages in Facebook Messenger.
Apps and websites are always going to experience occasional
disruptions due to the complexity of services they’re offering. But even when
they’re brief, they can become a real problem due to the huge number of users
many of these services have. A Facebook outage affects a suite of popular apps,
and those apps collectively have billions of users who rely on them. That’s a
big deal when those services have become critical for business and
communications, and every hour they’re offline or acting strange can mean real
inconveniences or lost money.