Facebook suffers biggest outage since 2008, Instagram and WhatsApp also affected

Users of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced significant issues accessing the platforms today.

The outage affected users around the world, but the problems did not affect all users in the same way.

Some users couldn’t log in, others couldn’t see their news feed, and some were totally blacked out of the applications.

The issue began about 3am AEDT on Thursday morning. At about 6am Facebook took to Twitter to acknowledge the issue was not related to a cyber attack.

Facebook appeared to be back online for many users at 2pm AEDT this afternoon.

We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.

— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

The outage was reportedly the worst to affect Facebook since 2008.

Dr Suelette Dreyfus, Cybersecurity expert at University of Melbourne, told Tom Elliott that no official explanation for the problems has been provided.

“It was somewhat amusing that Facebook was making announcements about the problems on Twitter,” she said.

Dr Dreyfus said social media has become essential to our daily lives.

This “illustrates how vulnerable our society is,” she said.

“It’s not only social…there are a lot of small businesses that depend on Facebook.”

“The reason we’re so in shock is because they are very reliable… so it’s a bit like ‘oh my god I’ve built my whole life around this platform and now my identity is gone!'”