back to article Facebook celebrates Independence Day by lighting up American outage maps

Facebook has found itself on the wrong side of the July 4th holiday buzz as the grandparent-approved social network has had severe server problems. On Wednesday morning (US time) the social network confirmed that there was an issue that was causing users to have problems loading media files. Instagram and WhatsApp have also …

  1. Criminny Rickets

    I's not just the US, It's North America. I'm in Canada and also experiencing the issue.

  2. Michael Jarve

    Instagram is also suffering from the wobbles.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      it's a feature

      not a bug. I have all FB domains blocked in my hosts files.

      https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jmdugan/blocklists/master/corporations/facebook/all

  3. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    Been a bad week

    to be in the telecomm industry.

    1. moooooooo

      Re: Been a bad week

      you picked a bad week to give up sniffing glue hehe

  4. d3vy

    Down detector home page makes it look like something is really wrong, loads of sites all started to show issues around the same time, not just FB owned ones either - Twitter, Snap, tinder, Visa all have spikes in reported issues at around the same time.

  5. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    Terminator

    Its

    the start of Skynet !!...

    The internet has become self aware and will shortly nuke us into oblivion... which saves having to tell people to f off when they start jibbering about love island or any one of a dozen car crash reality tv shows...

  6. Steve Graham

    From what I can see (far West limit of Europe), Facebook is working normally (normally, not correctly) except that most images are not showing up.

    This has the fun side effect that the ALT tags are easily visible now. (Browsers which I use will display a tooltip for TITLE, but not ALT.)

    Facebook obviously uses the awesome power of AI to analyze photos, so now you get things like "Image may contain: smiling child, dead horse, outdoors" and have to imagine what that looks like.

    1. Draco
      Pint

      Same here. Many images aren't appearing and I get to see the ALT tags - also a little more sluggish than usual.

      I'm on the continent.

    2. RobThBay

      ...have to imagine what that looks like....

      That's a new feature....it's called radio mode.

      :)

  7. Bitsminer Silver badge

    Some people never forget

    Traitor's Independence Day

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Some people never forget

      well, during the War of 1812 (circa 1812-14), the nick-name used by the British forces for the American side was "cousin John" - we here in the States are all grateful for the tornado that hit Washington DC, destroyed the British encampment and damaged many ships, and forced them to retreat from the Capital. But in the end we're all best buds - sorry to run on, but seems my facebook is down so what else have I to do?

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: Some people never forget

        we here in the States are all grateful for the tornado that hit Washington DC

        And the vast amount of support from the French, without which the rebellion may not have succeeded..

        (And lets' not forget - for the British the Americas was very much a sideshow since most of the British military were involved with conflicts in Europe..)

    2. Michael Jarve

      Re: Some people never forget

      I, for one, simply feel we were simply ahead of the curve in Brexit, and we did so successfully. Tomorrow, our Fearless Leader will be holding a military parade that would make Kim Jong-un proud to celebrate that fact.

    3. Marcus000

      Re: Some people never forget

      Steady on chap! Why do we take a break and have a nice cup of tea!

      Marco

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: Some people never forget

      You do realise that the Mayflower was just the first of the 'B' Arks, don't you?

      1. VinceH
        Happy

        Re: Some people never forget

        "You do realise that the Mayflower was just the first of the 'B' Arks, don't you?"

        That explains everything!

      2. Claverhouse

        Re: Some people never forget

        That is magnificent.

  8. tim 13

    Not just FB, WhatsApp is having issues with image sending and apparently Insta is down too

    1. Steven Raith

      Yeah, it's likely part of the shared backend between all three that's hooped, 503ing images all over the place.

      Steven "did some work today" R

      1. tim 13

        First noticed it early afternoon in U.K. with some photos not loading but thought it was a minor glitch. It’s obviously got worse. Much as social media is derided, I can’t imagine the complexity of trying to support something on that scale, I feel for their technical staff

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          It makes you wonder just what happened though, Since GDPR, data is supposed to be siloed in the EU for EU residents. You'd think FB having issues in one area would only affect users in that area or people requesting the data from that area. But this issue seems to have affected FB and friends worldwide at about the same time. Did they roll out an update across all the bitbarns worldwide? Or is it that everything is actually authenticated, served or routed through some central bitbarn? (Was it actually the NSA that had issues and not FB? </tinfoil hat mode>)

      2. Psmo
        Mushroom

        Yeah, it's likely part of the shared backend between all three that's hooped

        Finally found an upside to that buyout.

  9. ricardian

    Facebook problems in the UK - photographs not displaying

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      WhatsApp photos also; text and previews get through.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Cloud

    Other peoples computers you have no control over

  11. Steve Cooper

    Funny reading posts from people - "WiFi is down" or "the Internet is down" as all they know of the Internet is Facebook/Instagram or WhatsApp.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      It's taken me years to educate my wife and get her to understand that "Google is not working" (She's lost her internet connection) or "the telly isn't working" (Virgin media outage, we don't need a new TV) is not a helpful thing to say, especially if I'm 100 miles away and driving at the time.

  12. arctic_haze
    Mushroom

    Good riddance!

    I use my FB account only to see what my family sent me on that strange platform... after they email me about it.

  13. Daniel M

    Karma; or The Wrong Plug

    This is simultaneous with their cancellation of Facebook and Messenger app services for Windows 10 Mobile.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g_rWja1Xiu8

  14. FozzyBear

    Apologies to those that use those apps

    But for me, no great lose.

    It might have given those people the chance to put away their mobile and actually engage in a human to human conversation.

    Yeah, I know, too much to hope for.....Sigh

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: Apologies to those that use those apps

      Or if that's too big a step, use the phone as, y'know, a phone...

  15. Anonymous South African Coward Silver badge

    In the South of Africa there were some people moaning about whatsapp and fartbook givening issues.

    I just continued with my day as normally as I don't use fartbook.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Im seeing a pattern here

    3 major outages in 3 months all of which started with image servers going down.

    Im not sure we should be ignoring that pattern since the excuses given are anything but watertight.

  17. Sanrixa

    Not sure Facebook itself is proud to have so much influence in peoples lives?

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