Following a day of global outages of Facebook-owned websites and services like Instagram and Whatsapp, the company announced on July 4 that it was “back at 100 per cent”.
Many users and websites such as DownDetector reported Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram services as being down since Wednesday afternoon.
Facebook had tweeted their acknowledgement of the issue, saying: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We're sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
Speaking to media outlets, a Facebook spokesperson blamed a “routine maintenance operation” for triggering a bug that affected user's ability to upload or send photos and videos. Combined, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp have billions of users.
Curiously, Twitter services were also affected on Wednesday afternoon on a similar note, affecting user's ability to send messages to each other.
The company also resolved its issues at around the same time as Facebook. Twitter has over 300 million users worldwide.
Twitter and Facebook users were trending #FacebookDown and #TwitterDown on Wednesday, with many turning to memes for consolation in the absence of their favourite social media networks. All India Bakchod shared a humorous take on the situation.
The fact that Facebook had to make their announcement on Twitter was also poked at by some users who found it ironic.
This week saw many large service providers facing outages, with Slack, Google and Cloudflare all reporting issues. Both users and businesses have been affected by these outages.