Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram get back online after 7-hour outage

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW, Oct 5 (PRIME) -- Social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have resumed work after almost a 7-hour outage provoked by errors in software update, according to preliminary information, the companies said on Tuesday.

“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,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and a number of other applications belonging to Facebook were unavailable on Monday during almost seven hours. The problems were registered in the U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., the Netherlands, Russia, and other countries. Users had problems with the services’ websites and applications, server connection, and the like.

In 2019, a similar problem lasted only about an hour.

“Instagram is slowly but surely coming back now – thanks for dealing with us and sorry for the wait!” the social network said on Twitter. WhatsApp said it has fully recovered.

Russian social networks

VKontakte and Odnoklassniki told PRIME late on Monday they saw no problems. “All services and products of VKontakte function – there are no glitches or other problems,” the network said in a statement.

“Our technical team is optimizing the work of equipment for stable functioning of services because of a jump in activities. The number of VKontakte video views soared 18% and the number of sent messages in the messenger increased 21%,” the social network’s CEO Marina Krasnova said on her VKontakte page.

Odnoklassniki said that it registered a rise in activities in the use of the social network’s services, but had no issues.

Expert

“At the moment, we do not have information that the problems with access to many services were caused by cyberattacks. Most likely, it’s a consequence of a glitch in work of global provides,” antivirus maker Kaspersky’s chief expert Sergei Golovanov told PRIME.

Such glitches are not rare. Many services had troubles on November 25, 2020 due to problems in work of Amazon Web Services, he said.

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