Since last night (Monday, 4th October), it’s been reported that the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms (owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Inc. company) had experienced an unexpected glitch, resulting in users around the world failing to access their accounts.
The problem, which was initially expected to only last for a short period of time, had prolonged more than 6 hours, becoming the longest disruption ever in the history of Facebook. The three aforesaid social media platforms later confirmed the technical error via their official statement.
According to a report by DownDetector (via Harian Metro), the problem was detected at 11:30 pm (Malaysian time). Furthermore, it was revealed that more than 40,000 users had already lodged their complaints on the matter. The hashtag #InternetShutdown also began trending on social media, namely Twitter.
Following the technical mishap, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who’s also the largest shareholder of the company, was reported to have had to bear a loss of ~$7 billion (~RM29 billion) after the shares of his company plummeted 5%. Not only that, his position in the list of the world’s richest people also dropped to sixth place.
“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online. Sorry for the disruption today. I know how much you relied on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” Zuckerberg wrote in his statement on social media, apologising to members of the public for the service outage that occurred.
At the time of writing, it appears that the problem has already been solved. All of the services (FB, IG, and also WhatsApp) are currently working fine.
Sources: Harian Metro, VOCKET, Kosmo.
