For the second time in one month, Facebook and Instagram sites and services are unreachable in what looks to be a severe, global outage.
According to DownDetector.com, the outage began at roughly 6:28 EDT on Sunday, April 14. In less than two hours, more then 15,000 reports have been submitted to the site alongside nearly 9000+ comments from users checking in from hundreds of locations across the United States, Europe and Asia.
Those numbers are rising rapidly.
The complaints range from the inability to log in (20%), Facebook newsfeeds not appearing (57%) and what DownDetector calls a "total blackout" (20%). The site provides a live heatmap showing affected areas, and the situation looks especially bleak in Europe. Your mileage may vary, but the bottom line is that the sites are either inaccessible or broken.
As you'd expect, Facebook-owned services like Instagram and Whatsapp are affected, with reports pouring in quickly from around the world. Not every user is affected, but the live heatmap is only getting hotter as the west coast wakes up this morning.
At time of publication, Facebook has not addressed the issue on Twitter, which it ironically relies upon to reach out to its users when the social media network experiences problems -- like it did just last month. One has to chuckle when seeing Facebook's Twitter banner, proclaiming it's "Bringing the world closer together."
The last Facebook network outage was a windfall for rival messaging service Telegram, which boasted it had attracted 3 million new users in less than 24 hours.
I've reached out to Facebook for a comment, and will keep tabs on this unexplained social media outage. Updates will be posted below.
UPDATE 1
