Facebook Inc apologised to users for a two-hour downtime on Friday, blaming the outage on another erroneous configuration change. This is the company’s second global outage this week.
The latest outage disrupted the company’s social networking platform, Instagram, Messenger, and Workplace, according to the company.
“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours,” the company said. “We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”
Some users were unable to load their Instagram feeds during the most recent outage, while others were unable to send messages using Facebook Messenger.
People quickly flocked to Twitter to share memes and jokes in response to the second outage this week. “Looks like Facebook went to a 3-day work week. Monday and Friday shutdowns?” a Twitter user said.
Users were praised for their patience and “for all the memes this week,” according to Instagram.
The social media giant blamed a “faulty configuration update” for a nearly six-hour outage on Monday, which prohibited the company’s 3.5 billion users from using its social media and messaging services like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
The outage on Monday was the greatest that web monitoring company Downdetector had ever seen, affecting billions of users and contributing to a boom in the use of competing social networking and messaging apps.
Officials in Moscow claimed Monday’s outage proved Russia was right to establish its own social media networks, while EU antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager warned of the dangers of relying on just a few major companies, underscoring the need for more rivals.
Both disruptions added to Facebook’s woes this week, after a former employee turned whistleblower accused the company of prioritising business before policing hate speech and disinformation on Sunday.
