Facebook and its platform were facing problems for around 11 hours, as the company said the outage was triggered during “routine maintenance”.
The outage affected mainly photos, including uploads, Stories and posts on the Feed. Instead of photos, images were replaced by “eerily accurate” descriptions of what was in the picture. Such descriptions are usually hidden but the outages made them visible to everyone.
Twitter was also facing problems with its direct messaging service unusable during yesterday. According to the platform, it was having issues with the delivery of messages and notifications, though it appears that this issue has been fixed now.
It's fairly common for particular platforms and websites to go down, whether its server issues or maintenance. In March earlier this year, Facebook experienced the largest outage in its history after it faced a “database overload.”
Sometimes issues can occur after something goes wrong in the code. In 2009, a programmer at Google accidentally took down almost the entire internet by adding the url “/” to the company’s registry of blocked websites. As there is a “/” in basically every single website created, it meant nothing could be accessed online.
One of the worst instances of the internet breaking was back in October 2016 when a major DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack took down websites including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and PayPal amongst others.
A DDoS attack is when hackers coordinate junk traffic to a specific website which means it is unable to cope. In this instance, the Domain Names System (DNA), a crucial web directory, was affected which spread the problems to other websites. Hackers used unprotected Internet of Things devices to coordinate the attack which is why you should ensure every internet device you use is password protected.
