Facebook, Instagram suffer major global outage, down for hours

Facebook and Instagram on Wednesday suffered a major global outage. Users were unable to access the two platforms on their smartphones as well as on desktop. Messenger is also down for several users.

Some users complained that they could not log into their Facebook accounts. Instagram and Messenger users also faced similar problems. Some also complained that the News Feed was not refreshing at all. WhatsApp is also partially down for some users as they are unable to access some key features such as voice notes.

Facebook said it was aware about the issues with its applications and was working to resolve the problem.

"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack," Facebook said.

DDoS, also known as distributed denial-of-service, attack is when multiple devices flood the bandwidth of a targeted system, ultimately causing it to crash.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," the company said in a tweet.

According to downdetector.com, Facebook went down around 10pm IST. The global outage however started somewhere around 9:38pm. The live map showed Facebook was down in many parts globally including India.

Around the same time, photo sharing app Instagram also went down. It appears that Facebook and Instagram were affected by the same issue which caused the global outage.

Users naturally arrived on Twitter posting about the apps. Facebook is accessible but users cannot post any update. It shows a message saying that "something's gone wrong" and that it will get fixed soon.

The Facebook outage comes shortly after Google users faced similar issues with Maps and Drive services. Google later apologised for the interruption in the services.

This is not the first time Facebook suffered such global outage. In November last year, Facebook was down for approximately 40 minutes. The social networking company had then blamed a test for the interruption in services.

The Wednesday outage, however, will be among the biggest outages Facebook and its services have suffered ever. Facebook and Instagram are down for more than eight hours.