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Tag: outage

  • Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp users are reporting a “Major Disruption” worldwide

    Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp users are reporting a “Major Disruption” worldwide

    Meta is having big-time problems today. As of 3:40 pm EDT, Downdetector lists Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger as the top four apps/websites that are having issues based on the number of complaints received from users. For example, the number of Instagram users telling Downdetector about a problem with the app and website soared from 31 to over 5,700 in about 30 minutes. Meta is reporting this outage as a “Major Disruption” on its Business API Status page.

    Most of the complaints on Downdetector from Instagram users were from subscribers unable to see Stories that they had just posted. One user said that she had been trying to post a Reel on Instagram for over an hour. 67% of the complaints focused on the app, 28% had a problem with their feed, and 5% could not log in.

    Meta’s core four apps are down and dominate on the Downdetector website – Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp users are reporting a “Major Disruption” worldwide

    A huge number of Whatsapp users, nearly 25,000, reported that they were having an issue with the app and website at around 2:22 pm. 68% of the complaints were about issues with the app, 26% were not able to receive messages, and 6% were having problems with the website. Users in countries are far apart as New York and Romania were complaining about the messaging platform being down.

    Meta is calling this a major disruption – Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp users are reporting a “Major Disruption” worldwide (UPDATE)
    Meta is calling this a major disruption

    A far fewer number of Facebook users, 1,689, submitted a complaint to Downdetector by 2:27 pm EDT. 59% of those included a complaint about the app, 29% cited issues with the website, and 12% had problems signing in. As for Facebook Messenger, the number of complaints soared from 7 to 891 during a 45-minute period that ended at 2:19 pm EDT. Most of the platform’s users said that their messages were not going through.

    The outage is taking place worldwide with Meta saying that the issues began at 2:11 pm EDT. The company adds, “Our engineering teams are investigating the issue. We will provide another update within 4 hours or sooner if additional information is available.”

    When we learn more about the outage, we will update this story.

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  • Meta’s Facebook, Instagram down for hundreds of thousands of users across globe

    Meta’s Facebook, Instagram down for hundreds of thousands of users across globe

    Meta Platforms-owned Facebook and Instagram were down for hundreds of thousands of users across the globe on Tuesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

    The disruptions started around 10:00 am ET, with more than 300,000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40,000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.

    “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X social media.

    Meta’s status dashboard showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. There were around 200 reports of outages for WhatsApp on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

    The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with several users saying they had suddenly been logged out of the Meta-owned social media platforms.

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  • DBS Hit by Worst Outage in a Decade

    DBS Hit by Worst Outage in a Decade

    DBS faced two consecutive days of disruptions to its online banking services, marking the worst outage for the Singapore lender since its ATM glitch in 2010.

    DBS issued a social media post to address the recurring disruptions to its online banking services, including its payments app.

    Services were restored early this morning,» the bank said yesterday in a Facebook post. Unfortunately, yesterday’s digital banking issue has recurred and this has affected our services.

    The post attracted more than 2,500 comments, many of which expressed frustration about blocked access to banking accounts.

    Outages at DBS and its low-cost consumer banking unit POSB first occurred on Tuesday after reports first surfaced in the morning, according to Downdetector – a website that uses crowd-sourcing to track online outages. And just hours after resolving the issue yesterday morning, the outages continued at the bank.

    The inability to access an essential service over such an extended period of time is unacceptable and we deeply regret the inconvenience caused, DBS said in a separate social media post.

    This marks the worst outage experienced by the Singapore lender since 2010 when customers were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs for hours due to a major glitch which subsequently led to supervisory action by the city-state’s financial regulator.

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  • DBS May Face Regulatory Action Over Outage

    DBS May Face Regulatory Action Over Outage

    The Monetary Authority of Singapore said it will consider appropriate supervisory actions on DBS, which suffered recurring disruptions to its online banking services, including its payments app.

    This is a serious disruption and MAS expects DBS to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the root causes and implement the necessary remedial measures, Marcus Lim, MAS’ assistant managing director (banking and insurance), said in a statement.

    The regulator said the bank informed it about a problem with its access control servers that resulted in customers experiencing difficulties logging on to its digital banking services.

    Lim said MAS expects all financial institutions to have systems and processes to ensure the consistent availability of financial services to their customers.

    This week, DBS faced two consecutive days of disruptions to its online banking services, marking the worst outage for the Singapore lender since its ATM glitch in 2010.

    DBS Singapore country head Shee Tse Koon apologized for the outage in a video posted on the bank’s website and various social media pages on Wednesday afternoon.

    The bank also extended services at its branches for two hours and encouraged customers to use its phone banking services. In the meantime, I want to assure you that your deposits and monies are safe, Shee said.

  • Facebook blames Monday’s outage on “an error of our own making

    Facebook blames Monday’s outage on “an error of our own making

    Yesterday’s six-hour outage affecting Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Whats App had a severe impact on more than just users of those apps. The outage might have cost Facebook over $100 million in lost advertising revenue as the company happens to own all of the aforementioned apps.

    The company points the finger of blame at itself and says that the outage started when Facebook engineers were working on “routine maintenance.” In a blog post written by the firm’s VP of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, the executive says that the company is trying to learn from the outage so that it doesn’t get repeated.

    Janardham adds, “This outage was triggered by the system that manages our global backbone network capacity. The backbone is the network Facebook has built to connect all our computing facilities together, which consists of tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables crossing the globe and linking all our data centers.” Data centers, like Facebook users, come in different sizes and shapes.

    Some data centers are big buildings that house huge numbers of computers that store data and do the heavy lifting to keep the network running. Others are smaller facilities where device owners’ requests for data are sent and then moved using Facebook’s backbone network to larger data centers. That is where the data that your app needs is discovered and sent to your phone.

    Hours after the outage started, Facebook’s shares declined to reduce the worth of co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg by $6 billion. Over the last month, Facebook shares declined by 12.88%  dropping Zuckerberg’s personal worth down from nearly $140 billion to $120.9 billion. However, we don’t expect to see Facebook run a bake sale for its beleaguered chief executive.

    Routers are used to determine where all of the incoming and outgoing data should be sent. And occasionally Facebook engineers need to take the backbone offline for maintenance. And yesterday, a command was issued that was supposed to check the available capacity of Facebook’s backbone. Instead, it accidentally took down all of the connections in the backbone network which disconnected Facebook’s data centers around the world.

    Facebook has a system in place that is designed to audit commands to make sure that an accidental outage like the one that went down yesterday doesn’t take place. But the audit tool had its own bug that prevented it from stopping the command from shutting down the system.

    A second problem affected Facebook’s DNS servers. As stated in today’s blog post, “The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational. This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers.” Facebook notes that everything happened so fast that its engineers had two big problems: because its networks were down, the data centers could not be accessed by normal means and the loss of DNS broke the tools that Facebook would normally use to investigate and fix outages.

    Once Facebook was able to restore its backbone network connectivity, everything came back up. But Facebook had another problem to consider. If it turned all of its services back on at once, the amount of traffic running through the system could cause the system to crash again. But thanks to the “storm drills” that Facebook has been practicing, it was well prepared to handle the incident.

    The social media company says that it will learn from the outage so that it never happens again. “Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better, and there’s plenty for us to learn from this one. After every issue, small and large, we do an extensive review process to understand how we can make our systems more resilient. That process is already underway.”

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  • Facebook’s massive outage helped a rival app gaining millions of new users

    Facebook’s massive outage helped a rival app gaining millions of new users

    If you’re bothered by Facebook’s notoriously shady data harvesting methods and various other controversies surrounding the privacy and security of the social networking titan’s user base, it’s probably not a good idea to switch to Instagram. But there are actually many competing services and platforms on the market that Mark Zuckerberg does not own.

    One instant messaging app that has been growing at a pretty impressive pace for the past few years noticed a particularly large boost to its user numbers yesterday. According to its founder, Pavel Durov, a whopping 3 million people signed up for new Telegram accounts “within the last 24 hours.” It’s safe to assume that doesn’t happen every day for an IM and VoIP service that boasted a grand total of 200 million monthly active users around a year ago.

    While Durov doesn’t spell it out for us on his personal Telegram channel, the surge in sign-ups is naturally believed to be connected with Facebook’s most recent worldwide outage. A massive number of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users reported problems logging in to their accounts yesterday, and incredibly enough, the main social networking platform is still down for some people.

    Even though that seemed to boost the action (and jokes) on Twitter, where Facebook itself confirmed the issues, Pavel Durov suggests his app may have had more to gain thanks to its “true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.” Then again, Telegram had its fair share of scandals and controversies back in the day as well, disappearing from the iOS App Store at one point due to suspicions of rampant child pornography content spreading.

    The app is also banned in countries like Russia and China, although the reason for that might actually convince more people in the Western Hemisphere to switch from Facebook or WhatsApp to Telegram. Namely, a strict policy on sharing user information with government authorities.

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  • Vietnam urged to reduce power losses

    Vietnam urged to reduce power losses

    The electricity industry must improve its management and technology to reduce losses in the transmission grid as well as eradicate power stealing, which are very serious in rural and remote areas, delegates heard at a seminar in Con Dao Island in the southern province of Ba Ria – Vung Tau.

    Viet Nam is ranked 88th of 137 nations for power loss, with 8.95 per cent of power lost in the transmission process, according to the International Energy Agency.

    “Upgrading technology for the transmission grid and increasing awareness in rural and remote residents about power stealing are two urgent jobs,” Nguyen Tan Nghiep from the Southern Power Association told the Sai Gon Giai Phong (Liberated Sai Gon) newspaper.

    The Viet Nam Electricity Group (EVN) has set the goal to reduce power loss from 8.95 per cent to 6.5 per cent by 2020 by applying new technical and operational solutions as well as building new electricity plants and transmission grids.

    During 2016-20, EVN has invested in 13 electricity projects with total capacity of 6,989 MW.

    By ensuring electricity supply, power won’t need to be transmitted far distances and it will help reduce losses.

    For the transmission grid, a 500kV and 220kV grid in Ha Noi, HCM City and other big and industrial cities and provinces will be developed with modern technology to limit power loss.

    Lack of supply

    By 2020, hydropower, renewable and thermal power by gas will only provide 48.3 per cent of power demand and fall to 39.9 per cent by 2030, but power demand is expected to increase 9 – 10 per cent each year during 2016 -2030.

    Furthermore, a nuclear power plant in the central province of Ninh Thuan has been stopped by the Government, therefore, coal thermal power must be considered for economic efficiency and environmental pollution.

    “In the context of a 50 per cent shortage of power, proper power supply must be carefully chosen,” Dr Tran Trong Quyet, vice chairman of the Southern Power Association, said.

    He pointed out that renewable power would ensure environmental protection, but it would require a huge initial investment.

    “Coal thermal power will require a lot of land, is a big problem for environmental pollution and is a large expenditure, but it still plays a very important role in ensuring national power security,” he added.

    To limit the impact of coal thermal power, Quyet warned that modern technology to deal with coal slag and ensure coal supply must be done carefully.

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  • IMDA investigating Singtel broadband outage

    IMDA investigating Singtel broadband outage

    Singapore’s Infocomm and Media Development Authority (IMDA) is investigating Singtel over a recent nearly 24-hour broadband outage islandwide.

    Singtel announced the outage commenced at around 8:45am on Saturday and services were fully restored at 8:25am on Sunday, although some customers were still reporting connection problems.

    The operator said on social media that its engineers are still tracing the cause of the outage, which was associated with servers being unable to assign IP addresses to customers’ modems. TV, fixed phone and mobile services remained unaffected.

    Engineers have so far ruled out a DDoS attack, indicating that the company did not face a Mirai-linked attack of the kind that left a significant portion of customers of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom without services late last month.

    Singtel announced it will provide affected broadband customers with a 10% discount on their month’s bill, and the company will waive mobile data charges accrued over the weekend for its joint broadband and mobile subscribers.

    In a statement, the IMDA said the regulator takes service outages seriously and will be investigating both the cause of the incident and the service recovery measures taken by Singtel.

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  • Telstra hit with two more outages

    Telstra hit with two more outages

    Australian operator Telstra has been hit with two more network outages in the span of three days, weeks after committing to invest to improve its network resilience.

    On Friday, Telstra confirmed it was aware of an unplanned service disruption affecting NBN voice and data as well as ADSL customers.

    Telstra said the issue its engineers have identified is “extremely complex, but in simple terms there was a fault with the device that manages the interaction between our network and all of the different types of customer modems.”

    While the bulk of restoration efforts occurred two and a half hours after the company announced the incident, it took until late Sunday afternoon to resolve residual issues and fully restore services.

    But on Sunday customers were reporting another outage affecting Telstra’s mobile and broadband networks in Sydney, Melbourne,Brisbane and Perth.

    Some customers reporting issues may still have been affected by the residual problems from the Friday outage, the report states. But the mobile outage, which affected data services for some customers, appears unrelated.

    Telstra has been struggling with a spate of network outages over the past few months. The operator recently committed A$50 million ($36.2 million) towards addressing the issue by installing new monitoring equipment and improving its capacity to handle numerous simultaneous re-registrations.

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  • Telstra conducting network review after outages

    Telstra conducting network review after outages

    Australia’s Telstra and vendor partners Ericsson, Cisco and Juniper have assembled a team of engineering experts to conduct an end-to-end review of its network after the company experienced three mobile network outages in two months.

    During a recent speech at the CommsDay summit, Telstra Operations COO Kate McKenzie said the company has already implemented changes based on reviews of the network to increase the capacity and path diversity of critical signaling channels.

    The company also plans to shortly augment the capacity of the HLR front end that managers customers’ subscription data.

    While the review is underway, Telstra Operations is working under a heightened awareness plan including requiring executive-level review of any changes planned for the mobile and core IP networks.

    “Our network is resilient and we are determined to get the best advice from around the world to help ensure that it stays that way. Our focus is on ensuring our network is the best available and rebuilding our customers’ trust by meeting their expectations every day,” McKenzie said.

    Telstra has offered its customers two separate free data days as compensation for the outages, including one last Sunday. McKenzie revealed that its mobile customers consumed 2.68Tb of data by the end of the day, three times the amount downloaded on a normal weekday and 46% downloaded during the last free data day in February.

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  • Telstra to plans another free data day after outage

    Telstra to plans another free data day after outage

    Australia’s largest operator Telstra will offer customers another free data day as an apology for its third mobile network outage in less than a month.

    Telstra CEO Andy Penn said he is “deeply disappointed” and acknowledged that multiple outages in such a short period is “absolutely unacceptable.

    The outage took place on Thursday, and was caused by a large number of customers who were disconnected due to an international connectivity issue all reconnecting at once.

    An estimated 8 million subscribers were affected, or around half of Telstra’s total mobile customer base.

    While services were restored for most customers within two hours, the company was still responding to customer complaints over Twitter as of Friday with a message that the company was progressively restoring mobile services, the report notes.

    The disruption followed another outage affecting millions of customers  – which led the operator to offer customers a free data day by way of an apology – and another affecting around 500,000 pre-paid customers earlier this month.

    Also last week, Telstra announced it has appointed former Nokia CEO Stephen Elopto the newly created role of group executive for technology, innovation and strategy.

    In his new role Elop will help Telstra meet its ambitions of becoming a world-class technology company, Penn said in a statement.

    “Stephen will immediately add major firepower to our team with his extensive and deep technology experience and an innate sense of customer expectations. He is a recognized international technology leader and strategist from across a range of global organizations,” he said.

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