On July 3, Facebook suffered a glitch that left users unable to load images, videos and other data across its apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Users were unable to load photos in the Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, and download images and videos on WhatsApp. Facebook’s Messenger service was also affected. It took the company about eight hours to resolve the issue. On DownDetector, a website that tracks outages, live outage maps for these services showed that the US, Western Europe, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and parts of Australia were the most affected. MediaNama’s journalists also noticed these problems last night. [caption id="attachment_202333" align="aligncenter" width="349"] MediaNama journalists were unable to download images on WhatsApp on July 3.[/caption] According to Down Detector, users started reporting issues around 7 pm IST (9:30 am EDT) on July 3. At its peak, DownDetector received 7,656 reports related to Facebook, 14,753 related to Instagram, and 1,630 related to WhatsApp. Since Facebook and Instagram were equally affected, users resorted to Twitter, and #Facebookdown and #instagramdown started trending globally. However, direct messaging on Twitter was also affected. https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1146447958952439809 What did Facebook say? Driving the irony home in 280 characters, Facebook tweeted as the outage started: https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1146453213777936386 Eight hours later, at 2:36 am IST today, Facebook tweeted that the issue had been resolved, and said that it had been triggered during "routine maintenance operations". Earlier today, some people and businesses experienced trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps and platforms. The…
