Facebook And Instagram Can’t Seem To Keep Their Crap Together

Facebook And Instagram Can’t Seem To Keep Their Crap Together

Well, folks, Facebook and its “family of apps” has experienced yet another crash.

Problems that appear to have started Wednesday night were still being reported as of this morning, with Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Oculus and Messenger all experiencing issues. According to DownDetector, issues first started cropping up on Facebook at around 10:00PM AEST.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” Facebook tweeted just after 2:00AM today. A similar statement was shared from Instagram’s Twitter account.

[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2019/06/instagram-is-this-close-to-ruining-itself/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/flb3vyiytb6xzzk1hrvm.png” title=”Instagram Is This Close To Ruining Itself” excerpt=”You know what we definitely need more of on social media? Influencers and ads. And lucky for us, Instagram has announced a new tool for surfacing a hybrid of the two in your feed. Your Insta has never looked more #sponsored, baby!”]

Oculus, Facebook’s VR property, separately tweeted that it was experiencing “issues around downloading software”.

Facebook’s crash was still well underway as of 3:00AM AEST today, primarily affecting images. Where users typically saw uploaded images, such as their profile pictures or in their photo albums, they instead saw a string of terms describing Facebook’s interpretation of the image. Like this:

TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker noted on Twitter that all of those image tags you may have seen were Facebook’s machine learning at work.

This week’s crash is just the latest in what has become a near semi-frequent occurrence of outages. The first occurred back in March in an incident that Facebook later blamed on “a server configuration change”. Facebook and its subsidiaries went down again about a month later, though the previous incident was much worse, with millions of reports on DownDetector.

Two weeks ago, Instagram was bricked and experienced ongoing issues with refreshing feeds, loading profiles and liking images. While the feed refresh issue was quickly patched, it was hours before the company confirmed that Instagram had been fully restored.

We reached out to Facebook for more information about the issues but had not heard back a time of writing.


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