“Today a technical problem caused users to have problems accessing some Facebook services. We have solved this problem and we apologize for any inconvenience.” So a spokesman for Facebook explained the blackout today, while from his official profile on Twitter, WhatsApp wrote: “Thanks for your patience, it lasted 45 minutes but we are back”.
WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram have either been out of order or malfunctioned, according to the site Downdetector, which reports outages by collecting data from a variety of sources, primarily user-reported errors. Starting at 6pm today, hundreds of reports were also posted on Twitter, where the hashtags #instagramdown and #whatsappdown immediately jumped to the top of the trending topics.
These problems usually last a few hours, and occur in conjunction with updates or changes to the software of the platforms. Which are formally separate, but from a technical point of view they are instead based on the same technologies, and for this reason it is not surprising that they are all experiencing disservices at the same time. The other global blackout that had sent WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook into a tailspin was recorded on July 3, 2019 and a similar episode, even earlier, in April of the same year which evidently was a black year for these platforms. In fact, on March 13, 2019, the longest block in memory was recorded, a record of 14 hours of stop for apps. At the time, the inefficiencies seemed linked to the work in progress by the developers of Menlo Park who were just carrying out the ambitious project of integration of the three applications that are part of the group led by Zuckerberg. Regarding today’s blockade, the exact causes of the inefficiency are not yet known. The American site The Verge, specialized in technology, reports that on Instagram during the interruption it saw a blank page appear with the message “5xx Server Error”.
“At a time when millions of Italians are forced to work in smartworking, disruptions like the one today cause serious inconvenience and slow down citizens’ activities, preventing them from sending even important messages”, the Codacons promptly denounced. “It is above all the downfall of Whatsapp that arouses the ire of users and creates the greatest problems” adds the consumer association. “It is not the first time that similar blackouts have been recorded in Italy, which in this period of health emergency and forced smartworking appear even more serious” continues the association. “This is why we ask Facebook, owner of WhatsApp and Instagram, to automatically compensate all Italian users involved in today’s disservice, studying together with Codacons the most appropriate forms of compensation” adds the association.