Facebook and all of its services went down yesterday. It was down for a total of 20 hours, before it finally came back to 100-percent earlier today. It also did something that Facebook won’t be touting, and that is the fact that it broke the record for Facebook’s longest outage in its history.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down yesterday. There were parts of the day, where the services were working, sort of. But not completely. It only got fully restored around noon today. Facebook is blaming a server misconfiguration on the outage. It’s still a bit insane that it took nearly 20 hours to figure out the issue and fix it. Though it does make sense that it takes some time for the system to recover from the changes, given how large Facebook’s ecosystem is right now.
As a result of yesterday’s outage, a lot of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users were looking elsewhere to get their social media fix in. This included a number of them coming to Twitter – including Facebook, who ironically had to Tweet that its platform was experiencing issues. But it seems that people missed WhatsApp the most, as over three million new users signed up for Telegram – which is an encrypted messaging service that does not deliver ads or collect your information. WhatsApp is the biggest messaging platform around right now, so it makes sense to see a number of users – all three million – heading for Telegram.
Of course, this outage led to a number of people posting on Twitter about #FacebookDown, to a point where it was the number one trending topic, worldwide. And since this is 2019, it also led to a number of memes and GIFs, definitely keeping everyone busy during the downtime.
Facebook doesn’t normally go down, so seeing the site go down at all was a pretty big deal. But seeing it down for this long, is an even bigger deal. In the early days of Facebook, it would be common to see the platform go down, due to too many people using it. But as Facebook grew up, that became less of an issue. To now, where it is a very rare occurrence. This outage also showed everyone how much they depend on Facebook. Not only for passing time, but talking to their friends and family, sharing things and so forth. Yesterday, many had to resort to taking a photo and showing it to someone in person, of what they were eating for dinner.
As mentioned, Facebook doesn’t go down often. In fact, it’s most recent outage was back in November when it was testing a new feature, which messed up the whole platform. That outage lasted only 40 minutes. Typically the outages are less than an hour, not the nearly full day that this one lasted. Though it did give users the ability to go outside and get some fresh air instead of staying in front of their computer all day. So this could have been a good thing.