If you’ve been trying to scroll through your feed on Facebook or Instagram in the past hour, chances are you couldn’t. Same for WhatsApp if you’ve been trying to send that message but it simply would not go through. If like me, you got mad or snapped at someone at home because the internet was being slow as a sloth (or so you thought), take a chill pill, mate – it’s not the internet’s fault.
That’s because it turns out that Facebook (including its Messenger chat), Instagram and WhatsApp are all suffering an outage and it’s not just affecting you, it’s worldwide. The Verge reported that the issue started at about 6.30am ET (6.30pm Malaysian time), with some locations having it worse than others, such as in Europe and the east coast of the United States. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, the three countries facing the outage similarly are Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.
Source: BGR
According to NST, 9,000 reports regarding Facebook issues have since been logged on traffic-monitoring website DownDetector. At the time of writing, Facebook (who also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) has yet to issue a statement addressing this problem.
Twitter on the other hand, is working fine and netizens have taken to the social media platform to rant about the outage they’re facing. Others have resorted to the old school SMS or chat platforms like Slack and Skype.
This is a developing story. Stay tuned for more updates.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson has since issued a statement to The Verge saying, “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.”
At about 9pm Malaysian time, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp seem to have come back online. Phew! Now we can finally catch up with our loved ones.
Also read: Beware: Browser Extensions You Download May Lead to Hacked Facebook Messages
