Multiple times, social media apps have suffered outages which sometimes, are experienced globally. Users of platforms facing downtime usually hit snags while trying to operate them, challenges that include uploading media, publishing comments, editing profiles or refreshing live feeds.
When outages occur, platform servers are paused, this renders the affected apps temporarily unavailable or unusable. This results in users being logged out of their accounts or accounts being in a state of inactivity. Globally, Meta owned apps (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Threads) are ranked more likely to face outages than any other social media platforms.
The most recent global outage for two of the above apps being on Tuesday, 5 February 2024, when Instagram and Facebook suddenly suffered global downtime around 6PM local time. For over an hour, users were unable to post on Instagram while those affected on Facebook, were literally logged out of their accounts.
The issue has however been resolved.
As soon as outages occur, many social media users are usually thrown into panic mode, some trying to change their passwords, others checking their internet connections or restarting their devices. Such panic is linked to thoughts of one’s account being hacked or accessed by unauthorized persons.
When experiencing difficulty in accessing a social media account or app, you only have the first 10 minutes to confirm whether the issue is communal or isolated.
- Confirm Connectivity: Check on your internet connectivity to ascertain you have valid network connection and resources to access the internet. Most social media apps stop functioning when internet resource is depleted or having a problem.
- Force App to Stop from Settings: Instead of restarting your phone, go to settings and force the app to stop. This literally restarts the app or refreshes it, before you try accessing it again.
- Head to Down Detector or Outage Report: These are websites dedicated to showing platforms facing downtime real-time. All the major sites are listed as icons on the home page, if you don’t find a site that you’re looking for there, you can search for it. Results of apps facing outages start showing within minutes when users start experiencing problems while using them.
- Use other social media apps to verify the problem: At no one time will all social media apps face downtime. One is therefore advised to check updates from other platforms to follow recent conversations on non-working apps. Mostly when Meta Apps are down, Twitter is always among the reliable platforms to confirm the status of the apps.
- Confirm from other users: Contact your family, friends or colleagues who use the same app you are having problems in accessing. This will help in confirming whether the problem is wider or an isolated case.
Should the above turn negative, there are high chances your account is compromised and facing an isolated technical issue like hacking, which now requires you to seek professional assistance from techies to resolve.
