As we reported, on MondayAt around 17:45 Hungarian time, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp were closed worldwide. The services are all owned by Facebook, and run through a common infrastructure, so the joint shutdown is not surprising.
It also does not mean that one of the largest community sites in the world is taking down service. Below we have collected the previous major downtime.
March 2019: It’s one of the longest outages, with Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp only being unavailable for an hour, but it took 14 hours to recover from the error that caused it to crash during that time.
January 2015: A social site run by Mark Zuckerberg, who later admitted in a statement that his fault was due to liability, was shut down for just over 50 minutes. Facebook wanted to change something in its own system, but there was a complication.
June 2014: Facebook was shut down for 31 minutes, and this deadlock also affected all of the company’s services. This date is also a milestone because since then, social network outages have become “regular” and many large companies have flocked about it.
October 2013: This time, speaking in journalistic language, only a “typo” occurred, and Facebook was available, but users could not post for more than four hours. At the time, Facebook had an estimated 700 million users.
September 2010: Facebook became unavailable for more than two hours, this time again due to its developers being paralyzed – the company later admitted this. The solution became the classic “reboot your device” method.
2008: The longest Facebook shutdown ever lasted for one day and was caused by a bug. At the time, the social site still had “only” 80 million registered users.
July 2007: There were still recurring issues running Facebook at the time, so it was common practice to “close” the site while bugs were fixed. This happened in 2007 as well, but at that time it caused much fewer problems for a much smaller number of users. Today, the situation is different: Facebook has almost 3 billion registered users.
(Cover Photo: NurPhoto / Getty Images Hungary)
