World enews: Instagram and Facebook down: Users suffer issues days after major outage

Instagram and Facebook appeared to be out of action again for many users on Friday, just days after a major outage.

A company spokesperson for Facebook, which owns both apps, told The Independent: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Online website tracker DownDetector showed a major spike in complaints about Instagram, at around 3pm ET on Friday as approximately 2,000 people also reported being unable to access Facebook.

instagram’s down AGAIN maybe if they stopped making so many changes no one asked for the app wouldn’t break on a weekly basis but idk that’s just my opinion

— James Charles (@jamescharles) October 8, 2021

Many took to Twitter to complain about access difficulties and voiced frustration with the apps, as the outage came hot on the heels of Monday’s social media crisis, when WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook were down for more than six hours.

The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm UK time on Monday.

Facebook’s largest outage in history was caused by a wrong command that resulted in what the social media giant said was “an error of our own making”.

“We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorised access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making,” read a post published by the company on Tuesday.

Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice-president for engineering and infrastructure, apologised to “people and businesses around the world who depend on us”, and added that the company understood “the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services”.

It also committed to learning more about what had happened and how it can be avoided in the future.