Facebook suffered another outage this Friday. Soon after few days of its major services went down for almost six hours, it happened again.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” the company said on its verified Twitter account on Friday. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Instagram, which is also a Facebook-owned application, announced on Twitter that few of their users were also facing issues upload pictures, stories, etc.
Facebook said the problems were resolved about two hours after they first appeared, and that they were caused by a “configuration change,” but weren’t related to the widespread outage earlier this week.
“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours,” the company said in a statement. “We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”
This time the disruption was for a small period compared to what all those platforms faced on Monday. This time they were reported by a few thousands of people.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all inaccessible to almost every part of the US on Monday. Facebook later said the issue was due to “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers” and which “caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
The problems on Friday bring an end to a week of controversy for Facebook. The outage occurred the day after Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company, identified herself as the whistleblower who leaked several company documents to the Wall Street Journal.
These documents, along with Haugen’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, showed that Facebook was aware of a number of issues caused by its apps, including Instagram’s potential “toxic” effect on teen girls.
Next week, Haugen is expected to testify before a House select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, according to the sources.
