Facebook down: Website not working as users can’t get online
Users saw a blank white page instead of the familiar news feed
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Facebook has gone down, according to thousands of its users.
Problems appeared to be spread across the world, with users in a variety of countries reporting problems.
Users reported seeing a blank white page instead of the familiar news feed.
Some reported that they were able to get online through the app version of the social network, rather than the website.
The issues began around lunchtime in the UK, according to tracking website Down Detector.
Unlike many other websites and services, Facebook and Meta do not run a devoted server status page to track outages. The company does have a business focused update page – which tracks the “Status and outages of Meta business products” – but that only showed problems with the Meta Business Suite that meant that advertisers were struggling to send inbox messages on Instagram.
Facebook outages are often brief and the company rarely comments on them before they are resolved. But there are notable exceptions: in 2021, for instance, Meta products were hit by a huge outage that took services offline for hours.
Later, Meta said that was the result of a single wrong command that had been used during a “maintenance job”. It was part of an attempt to fix the “backbone” that connects Facebook’s data facilities together.
“During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally,” said Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, then.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments