Facebook Down for 6 Hours, Possibly Longest Ever

Facebook Down for 6 Hours, Possibly Longest Ever
A smartphone stock photo (Karly Domb Sadof/AP)
Jack Phillips
3/13/2019
Updated:
3/13/2019

Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have been down for six hours, considered extremely long for the platforms. Some have speculated that it’s the longest Facebook outage ever.

Last August, Facebook went down for about 45 minutes, which was described as a relatively lengthy outage for the firm.

According to Facebook’s developer dashboard, it’s been six hours since the social media website and app went down for millions of people.

A number of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users have said the websites are down. (Downdetector)
A number of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users have said the websites are down. (Downdetector)
“We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution,” Facebook wrote, adding that it is “investigating.”

The company, in a tweet at 2:30 p.m. ET, wrote that it’s trying to resolve the issue “as soon as possible,” confirming that the outage “is not related to a DDoS attack.”

Previously, there was speculation and rumors that Facebook was hit with a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack.

According to AdAge, advertisers were also locked out of Facebook’s ad manager.

“On Wednesday, Facebook Ads Manager, the lifeblood of advertising, was out of order, along with the rest of the platform. Ads Manager is the self-serve advertising website that millions of marketers use to schedule their campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger,” according to the website.

It noted that Facebook manages some $90 million in ad revenue per day.

The fact that its services have been partially out for hours suggests that the issue isn’t something that Facebook’s engineering team can easily fix.

Twitter Jokes

For most of the day, the hashtags #FacebookDown, #InstagramDown, and more were featured prominently in Twitter’s trending section.
Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter with 15 years experience who started as a local New York City reporter. Having joined The Epoch Times' news team in 2009, Jack was born and raised near Modesto in California's Central Valley. Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/jackphillips5
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