Social media users across the country were unable to check their Facebook and Instagram feeds on Thursday morning, as the apps both went down.
People rushed to Twitter to react to the outage, with the hashtags #InstagramDown and #FacebookDown trending.
One person tweeted: “Meta needs to do better. This happens too often! I can’t remember the last time other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, even google went down.”
Another joked: “My thoughts and prayers are with the influencers during this difficult time #InstagramDown.”
Meta needs to do better. This happens too often! I can’t remember the last time other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, even google went down. #instagramdown #facebookdown
— Malika (@malika_grant98) March 24, 2022
Anyone else's Instagram and Facebook down ? #facebookdown #instagramdown #Dublin
— LyndsLeahy (@LeahyLynds) March 24, 2022
Are Instagram and Facebook down? @Meta #facebook #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/Boir764eEK
— Ruth O'S (@ruthiebos) March 24, 2022
Instagram & Facebook down 🤓#hitwitter #instagramdown
— TheBeautyKemple👸🏼 (@thebeautykemple) March 24, 2022
Coming to twitter to check if instagram is down…#instagramdown pic.twitter.com/bBVhT7WQwY
— Bruno’s Thoughts 2.0 🇯🇲🏴 (@BrunosThoughts_) March 24, 2022
My thoughts and prayers are with the influencers during this difficult time #InstagramDown
— Irish Football Pics (@irish_pics) March 24, 2022
Me arriving on Twitter to find out what’s going on with #instagram & #facebook!! 🤔 #instagramdown #Facebookdown pic.twitter.com/mCCWSwZCpq
— Vickie (@UnicornDigitalM) March 24, 2022
Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp suffered a serious outage in October last year, and people weren’t able to get onto the social media sites for over 6 hours.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the mass shut down of their services.
In a statement at the time, the company said: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.”
“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.”
“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.”
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication,” they continued.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt. Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations.”
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” they added.
