Facebook Inc. on Friday apologized to users for a two-hour disruption to its services and blamed another faulty configuration change for its second global outage this week.
The company confirmed that its social media platforms, Instagram, Messenger and Workplace are affected by the latest outage.
“Sincerely sorry to anyone who hasn’t been able to access our products in the last few hours,” the company said. “We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”
During the latest outage, some users were unable to load their Instagram feeds, while others were not able to send messages on Facebook Messenger.
People increasingly took to Twitter to share memes and jokes about a second service disruption this week. “Looks like Facebook went into a 3-day work week. Closed on Mondays and Fridays?” One Twitter user said.
— rap (@MyNameIsRaph) 8 October 2021
Instagram thanked users for their patience and “for all the memes this week”.
Things have settled down, and everything should be back to normal now. Thanks for working with us (and for all the memes this week)
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) 8 October 2021
On Monday, the social media giant blamed a “faulty configuration change” for the nearly six-hour outage that blocked the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing social media and messaging services like WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
Monday’s outage was the largest that web monitoring group DownDetector had ever seen and blocked access to apps for billions of users, prompting increased use of rival social media and messaging apps.
Moscow officials said Monday’s outage showed Russia was right to grow its social media network, while EU antitrust chief Margaret Vestager highlighted the repercussions of relying on some big players, and the need for more rivals. Underlined the need.
Both outages put pressure on Facebook this week after a former employee turned whistleblower, accusing the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over cracking down on hate speech and misinformation, on Sunday.