Facebook and Instagram Coming Back Online After Widespread Outages

By Spencer Perry

While rumors continue to spread about what happened, online social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have both begun to come back online after some six and a half hours of being down. Facebook first began to experience problems around 11:30 AM ET and has started to show up for some users around 6 PM ET. Details from the platform have not been announced about what happened to cause Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to go offline for several hours but a full statement will almost no doubt be released....eventually. Fittingly, Facebook had to release a statement on Twitter after the outage began.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," they wrote on Twitter when the outage began. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." In response to the return of their services, Facebook issued another tweet, writing: "To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us."

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer Tweeted a statement of his own at the time of the outage as well, writing: "*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."

Marvel fans were quick to blame the Mad Titan Thanos for dusting Mark Zuckerberg's servers. Gags and jokes abounded online about Facebook being down, how everyone was moving to Twitter, and more, highlighting how integral these systems are to every day life in both a funny and sad way.

Many online were postulating that Facebook had taken itself offline after the bombshell 60 Minutes report titled "The Facebook Whistleblower," that alleged the company put profits and engagement over user safety and the fight against misinformation, among other things.

Lena Pietsch, Facebook's director of policy communications, released a statement in response to the report, writing: "Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."

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