It lasted some eight hours, but Facebook appears to be back up for most users, as of Wednesday night, reported Deadline. That being said, Instagram and Whatsapp, which were also own for a large chunk of the day, are still experiencing issues.
The widespread social media outage began around noon EST on Wednesday, and since much of humanity’s communications these days occur over the information superhighway, it led to mass confusion. Many turned to Twitter, the largest social media giant that was left unaffected by the outage instead, leading to the expected litany of jokes and gifs. Souljah Boy rang in to offer his own solution to the problem: use his own social media app, which has been around for some time anyway. Cardi B also chipped in with her own prank.
The outage was largely regulated to the United States and Europe, as well as parts of South America. Facebook assured users that the outage was not due to a cyber attack, or a DDoS — a distributed denial of service attack. USA Today quoted an engineer with network performance firm Netscout claiming the outage was due to an “accidental traffic jam issue with a European internet company that collided with Facebook and other websites,” which happens now and again.
(Via Deadline)