Outage plagues Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp ahead of Black Friday Sale, throwing users and businesses into panic

Yesterday, (on 20th November) Facebook and its subsidiary services- Instagram and Whatsapp- went down for users around UK, Europe, and the US. This is the second time Facebook faced an outage this month. According to Facebook's site for developers, the outage started around 6 a.m. Eastern time. The outage lasted for 13 hours.
48% Facebook users reported a total blackout, while 35% faced issue with login, and 16% users had issues viewing pictures. In the case of Instagram, 53% of users had problems with their newsfeed, while 33% had issues with login, and 13% with the website.

Facebook responded to this outage on Twitter, assuring users that they were working towards resolving the issue.

https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1064905103755247621

Facebook's Ads Manager, the tool that lets users create advertisements on its social network, also crashed, just days before businesses use Facebook and Instagram to promote Black Friday sales. This left would-be advertisers unable to create new ad campaigns. One of Facebook’s representatives confirmed the outage to Bloomberg, and stated that people and companies can't create new ads or change their existing campaigns due to the issue. The representative added that advertisements previously launched through the system are still running on Facebook.

Many advertisement creators that use Facebook to publish ads were in a confused state once this news was out.

https://twitter.com/KayaWhatley/status/1064934308220149760

https://twitter.com/stevekatasi/status/1064977427405901825

Once the service was up and running, Facebook tweeted:

https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1065036077486944256

In spite of the official announcement that ‘Facebook was 100 percent up for everyone’, many users complained that the site was not in a completely functional state. Amongst persisting issuers were: pictures not loading, gifs not loading all the way, broken links in posts, messenger app not functioning properly, pages not loading, accounts not been restored and many more issues.

Facebook has not yet reverted back to these complaints.

Talking of Facebook issues, Zuckerberg is still on the defensive a report in The New York Times that threw the company under scrutiny for its security breaches from Russian accounts ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how it deals with controversies it faces. In an exclusive interview with CNN yesterday, Zuckerberg confirmed that Sheryl Sandberg will continue working for the company and that he won’t be stepping down as chairman.