Facebook, Instagram report issues again after outages on October 4
Facebook and Instagram apologized again for more issues after users reported problems signing in to their accounts on Friday afternoon.
Social Media
On Twitter, both companies released statements pledging to return things back to normal.
"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook said in a message identical to the one posted on October 4, when global outages on the site caused an uproar worldwide.
Instagram sent out a similar message apologizing for the issues on Friday.
The issues seemed to be on a smaller scale and appeared to have been solved by around 5 pm ET.
The problems come days after Facebook was forced to apologize to the many people and businesses that were disrupted by the lengthy outage on Monday. The outages disrupted the Facebook platform, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, crippling communication for millions of people worldwide.
This week, Facebook's Santosh Janardhan explained the issue in a blog post, writing that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between Facebook's data centers caused issues that interrupted communication. The problems also hindered Facebook employees' efforts to communicate with each other and remedy the issue quickly.
"To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today's outage across our platforms. We've been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running," Janardhan said.
"The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem."
The company was quick to dispel rumors that the outage resulted from a cyberattack and denied that any user data was at risk of compromise.
The outage capped a rough week for Facebook, which faced additional backlash due to the Congressional testimony of Frances Haugen, a former employee of the company who leaked documents to The Wall Street Journal showing the platform is fully aware of its damaging effect on young children, particularly teenage girls.