A major outage has completely wiped the massive social network’s entire lineup of apps, leaving them hanging on refreshing. Since about 5pm (UK time), the apps have been unable to load any content. This isn’t the first time the apps have gone down in 2021, with an outage only just a few weeks back that was quickly rectified. This, however, seems to be lingering a little longer.

The Verge leaked a transcript in which CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had said that these outages were a “big deal”:

“And then it takes months to fight and earn back people's trust and usage of our services. So yes, it's a big deal. We're doing worse on this now than we were before. We need to focus more on this … There have been a few different outages recently … But at a high level they come from different areas.” – Zuckerberg talking in a Q&A, leaked by The Verge in 2019.

Facebook often does maintenance on their servers, which rarely has any real effect on the overall service, but sometimes an occurrence like this happens and everything goes down.

When that happens there’s panic globally as people lose the ability to message and keep in touch with what’s going on.

It’s not the sort of publicity that Facebook want at the moment.

It was subject to yet more criticism last week, as reports have come regarding their studies around children, seeing them as an ‘untapped’ potential of new revenue, and that studies have found that Instagram has a genuinely negative effect on teenagers.

There’s also the very real horror story from a whistleblower about the January 6th Capitol Riot and there’s been plenty of other criticism around the power it wields in politics.

About the Author

Joel Loynds

Joel is a a lover of janky games, Magic the Gathering, and going down rabbit holes. For PC Guide he has written about peripherals, the Steam Deck, retro games, news and more.