We have seen many outages from Facebook over the past 12 months. However, it must be said that the frequency of this outages is increasing now. Back in March, we saw the biggest outage that the company’s services have ever suffered. It was almost 24 hours that all of Facebook’s services including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down. Last night as well, on July 3, Facebook’s suite of apps went down partially. We say partially because users were not able to download images and videos on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
However, you could send messages on WhatsApp, Messenger, as well as comment on Facebook and Instagram. The issue was worse on Instagram as it is an image-centric platform and there were no images to display. Now, the reason why all the services went down was that Facebook’s Image CDN was down. A CDN or content delivery network provides images and videos that are uploaded on the server. Since this service was down, no files were provided to be downloaded.
Once the services went back up, Facebook gave the reason why they went down in first place. The company says that there was a routine maintenance operation that took place. In that operation, the engineers “triggered an issue” which had caused people to not be able to download images or videos. Now, Facebook says, that the problem is resolved and their services are back to normal. Facebook reveals that they faced a downtime of 2.5 hours due to this problem and they have also issued an apology.
This outage also comes a day after the CloudFare outage which took down a majority of the websites around the world as most of them are hosted on CloudFlare. It is also worth mentioning that Twitter’s Direct Messages were also having a problem while Facebook’s services were down.