Facebook Down again on Friday afternoon

This is the second time in a week that Facebook’s services have been disrupted due to significant issues with the social media network. Services were back up and running within 30 minutes after Facebook tweeted about the outage, so it didn’t last long.

According to DownDetector.com, a tool that depends on complaints from users to assess whether websites are experiencing problems, all of Facebook’s major products — Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the “big blue app” of Facebook — experienced downtime at roughly 3 p.m. Eastern time.

Just after 5 p.m. Eastern, Facebook said that it had fixed the problem that had been plaguing users around the world. While Facebook claimed the outage was caused by a “configuration” update, which normally refers to alterations in the company’s underlying technological infrastructure, it did not provide any other information. 

In a statement, the company apologised to everyone who had been unable to access its products over the past couple of hours. Facebook said Friday’s outage was unrelated to Monday’s troubles when its apps were unavailable internationally for more than five hours.

The outage on Monday served as a sobering reminder of how reliant the world has become on Facebook’s services. Globally, more than 3.5 billion people rely on them on a daily basis. During the downtime, entrepreneurs and business owners reported losing hundreds of dollars in sales because they couldn’t make purchases on Instagram or through their Facebook stores.

People in countries where WhatsApp is highly used, such as Brazil, India, and the Philippines, were unable to contact friends, family, coworkers, or customers because of the outage. More than a billion individuals around the world use WhatsApp. As the App progressively came back online after Monday’s outage, the company warned that it would take time for its services to recover.

After a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products like Instagram and WhatsApp Messenger offline, the personal wealth of social media giant Facebook Chief Executive and Founder Mark Zuckerberg dropped by nearly $7 billion (R105 billion) in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people. According to Facebook’s reaction, political division is a multifaceted issue that cannot be attributed solely to technological advancements.