Facebook blamed a ‘database overload’ for the most severe outage in its history today after normal service was restored globally following 14 hours of problems.
Social media users in parts of the US, Europe, South America and Japan were worst hit by the problems which also affected its apps Instagram and WhatsApp.
All of the networks appear to now be working again, and staff at the California-based company denied it was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The last time Facebook was disrupted to a similar extent was in 2008, when the website had 150m users – compared to around 2.3billion monthly users today.
A source told NBC Bay Area its database was ‘overloaded’, adding: ‘We are racing to spin up new machines as others go down. Mostly resolved… but it takes time.’
Issues with accessing the website began last night – and by this morning most users had their service restored, although some people could still not log in.
Facebook, which gets much its revenue from advertising, was still investigating the overall impact today ‘including the possibility of refunds for advertisers’.
A Facebook spokesman tweeted shortly before 6pm last night: ‘We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps.
‘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 has not yet provided a further update, but at 4.40am Instagram tweeted an image of Oprah Winfrey screaming and said: ‘Anddddd… we’re back.’
Social media users flocked to Twitter to complain about the outage, with more than a third of affected Facebook users reporting a ‘total blackout.’
Others said they could not refresh the News Feed or log into their accounts. Similar problems cropped up on Facebook Messenger at roughly the same time.
Meanwhile Instagram users reported being unable to refresh the feed, log in, or access the desktop site, while Messenger users were not receiving messages.
dailymail.co.uk
