Facebook, Instagram Finally End Days Of Uptime By Returning To Some Downtime

The Facebook empire on Friday experienced some aftershocks after its massive Monday outage, leaving some netizens unable to use its apps and websites as expected.

Unlucky, or perhaps lucky, folks found themselves hitting errors when accessing parts of the social network as well as its Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger units. Attempts to view notifications, for instance, brought up the message: "Error performing query."

The services appear to be recovering, if they are not already recovered, after about an hour or two of disruption. Another configuration change was reportedly blamed.

"We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook said in a statement earlier today. "We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience."

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Whatever was causing the errors went beyond people's notifications and picture sharing – and into far more vital territory.

At 1225 PT, the social network said on a status page for its all-important internet ad systems: "We are aware that some advertisers may be having trouble creating or editing their ads in Ads Manager. Our engineering teams are aware and are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

By 1304 PT, things were getting better: "We have recovered from an earlier outage impacting editing and creation in Ads Manager, and services have now been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused."

This comes after Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook universe of apps and websites completely fell offline for six hours, along with internal tools and systems, on Monday due to what was described as a backbone network misconfiguration that had cascading effects. Staff were unable to use their keycards on site, and struggled to diagnose and repair the technical breakdown.

And all that came amid a whistleblower calling on Congress to regulate Facebook after leaking some of its internal research. The US giant claims it is used by 1.9 billion people every day. ®