Tag Archives: outage

Facebook and Instagram down, seemingly worldwide

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This is a breaking story so we’ll provide updates as they become available.

As of this writing, both Facebook and Instagram are down, at least here within the United States. We are also receiving reports of an outage in Europe. Oddly enough, the website IsItDownRightNow also seems to be experiencing problems making information harder to come by.

Right now, all information is coming in from Twitter.

While we have no reason to think this anything out of the ordinary, we should mention that there was a perhaps controversial release of information regarding the Facebook platform reported on 60 Minutes last night and it certainly has some people talking today.

Continue to check back for new information.

UPDATE 1: While the service IsItDownRightNow is running fine again (seems to have just been a short glitch), Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp remain completely down

UPDATE 2: Per @TheInsiderPaper “Facebook’s DNS problem is actually affecting the internet. DNS providers are being hammered with queries.”

The service has been communicating with users via Twitter. There are also rumors that internal systems are down and that workers are communicating with one another via Outlook email.

UPDATE 3: Facebook is back up, but rolling out to users slowly.

Facebook had an Outage

Facebook,

FacebookFacebook had a temporary outage that affected all traffic from the internet and apps to the social network. The popular social network was down for somewhere between ten minutes and about half an hour or so (depending upon which news resource you read and which country it was located in). At the time I am writing this blog, Facebook has returned to its usual service.

The Guardian reported that this was the longest outage that Facebook has had in four years. It also shared that there was a noticeable drop in the amount of Facebook referrals to The Guardian while Facebook was out of service.

About 1.28 billion users were suddenly unable to access Facebook while it was having the outage. TechCrunch reports that Facebook was unavailable in multiple regions around the world. This included the UK, France, Belgium, and parts of Asia (including India).

Personally, I noticed that my friends who live in Australia were posting Tweets in which they wondered why Facebook was down. It was rather amusing to see people from all over the world turn to Twitter to complain (and make jokes) about Facebook’s outage.

TechCrunch also reported that the outage affected not only the Facebook website and its smartphone and tablet apps but also some Facebook plug-ins that were attached to other websites. Those of you who use Facebook and have connected it to other websites may want to check and see how you were affected by the outage. Or, you may want to check your stats to see how Facebook’s outage affected traffic to your website.

What happened that caused Facebook to have an outage? That hasn’t been revealed. Several websites (including The Guardian) posted a statement that came from Facebook. It said:

Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Blackberry Offers Free Apps in Apology. Will You Forgive RIM?

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In result to last week’s Blackberry outtage, RIM profusely apologized for the issues they came up with. In return, they are offering $100 in free applications to their users. Will that be enough for Blackberry users to continue with the phone?

Last week, Blackberry had a nation-wide email and Internet services outtage that lasted 3 days. A “network failure” was to blame for this outage. ZDNet is reporting that RIM has lost $350 million for that outtage.

Today, RIM put out a press release. CEO Mike Lazaridis made a public apology and then announced they will be giving customers $100 in applications as compensation.

“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. “We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers.  We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.”

The list of applications are:

  • SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
  • Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
  • N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
  • Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
  • Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
  • Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
  • DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
  • iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
  • Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
  • Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
  • Shazam Encore – Shazam
  • Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo
Are Free applications enough to customers? What if I already bought all of these applications already? Will I get a refund?

These Applications are only $35

Apparently, these 12 applications are $8.33 each? Well, no – Each application is probably on average $2.99 each. I even thought a couple of those applications were free already.
You have 4 weeks to download all of these titles between October 19th and November 16h (4 weeks). But 12 applications at $2.99 each is only $35.
RIM states other applications will become available as they go, but this is not compensation. What is compensation? Maybe a FREE MONTH of service?
Whether or not it will keep customers remains to be seen. But it is important to call your carrier and complain. This is not the first time a phone had a major outage (Remember in October 10, 2009, Microsoft Sidekick had a outage that deleted user data). But it’s all about how customers can be reimbursed for the issue.