FaceBook Hit With 14 Hour Outage

If you tried to get on Facebook yesterday but couldn't, you were far from alone. On Wednesday March 13, the social network was hit with an outage that made it not accessible to most of it's users. The disruption lasted for about fourteen hours, it's worst in over a decade.

Facebook announced the outage through another social network: Twitter, "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 cause of the trouble has not been officially announced, though Facebook denied it was a Distributed Denial of Service attack. One NBC reporter stated the problem came from "overloaded" databases.

The problem was worldwide, and numbers in Europe and Asia are reportedly still having trouble.  Instagram and WhatsApp, which are owned by Facebook, were also down.

Reactions from people varied from people complaining they couldn't message to friends, to people poking fun at themselves that they had no idea what to do, to some wondering if this was a reminder about how many have become dependent on social networks. The last time Facebook was down for this long was in 2008 when it had 150 million users. Today, over two billion use it.

Sources: BBC, NBC, Twitter

Bixyl Shuftan