Facebook and Instagram go down again for second time in week

Instagram and Facebook went down again for the second time in a week as Downdetector received 36,000 reporters for the former and 2,000 for the latter in the just one hour

Facebook and Instagram went down in a worldwide outage for the second time in just a week.

According to Downdetector, which monitors the status of some of the most-heavily visited websites in the world, there were 36,000 reports of malfunctioning for Instagram at about 7:30pm UK time.

More than half (58 per cent) had to do with the app while 23 per cent related to server connection issues.

Facebook and Facebook Messenger also appeared to be down for some users on Friday night as 2,000 and 954 reports were received by Downdetector respectively.

Up to 60 per cent of the Facebook reports related to issues accessing the website while 24 per cent had to do with the app.

There didn’t seem to be as many WhatsApp users experiencing issues as there were with Facebook and Instagram, but reports did spike at about 7.30pm to 141.

Both Instagram and Facebook have since said their platforms are back up and running.

“Things have been fixed, and everything should be back to normal now.

“Thank you for bearing with us (and for all the memes this week),” it said on Twitter.

Facebook said the issue was down to a configuration change as it apologised to its billions of users on Twitter saying: “We’re so sorry if you weren’t able to access our products during the last couple of hours.

“We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue — thanks again for your patience this week.”

A Twitter hashtag #Instagramisdown started making the rounds on the platform, which on Monday became people’s go-to when all the other main social platforms were down.

Desperate social users wanting to get back to their virtual social life on a Friday night flooded Twitter with memes that voiced their frustration at the second outage.

It came after a six-hour global outage on Monday meant billions of users were unable to access their favourite communication and social media channels.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down, with Mark Zuckerberg’s company apologising for the disruption which saw stocks for the social giant shockingly fall by nearly 5 per cent.

While the platform remained inaccessible, Facebook users kept seeing error page or a message saying their browser couldn’t connect.

WhatsApp and Instagram users could access the apps but were unable to see any new content, including any sent or received messages.

WhatsApp Web, the desktop version of the messaging app, didn’t appear to be loading on computers either.

The outage on Monday was the largest Downdetector had ever seen and blocked access to apps for billions of users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook, which owns all three platforms, said the glitch was caused by an error during a routine maintenance job and “not by malicious activity”.