Facebook Says Access Is Fixed After Latest Outage

Facebook said the problems for some people Friday were unrelated to the global outage Monday.

Photo: Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

Facebook Inc. FB 0.25% said access to its products was restored for users who experienced issues Friday, a disruption that came days after the social-media giant suffered an hourslong outage earlier this week.

“Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours,” a Facebook representative said in a statement. “We fixed the issue, and everything should be back to normal now.”

Facebook said the problems for some people Friday were unrelated to the global outage Monday, which left more than 2.9 billion internet users unable to access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and other tools for roughly six hours.

Charts produced by Downdetector, which tracks website outages, showed an uptick in reports of outages for the company’s platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp beginning just before 3 p.m. ET Friday. The number of outages reported appeared to fall over the next two hours. Facebook and Instagram acknowledged the issues in posts on Twitter Friday afternoon.

It wasn’t immediately clear Friday how many users were affected by Facebook’s latest networking issue.

On Monday, Downdetector reported more than 10.6 million problem reports from around the world, the largest ever detected by the platform. Facebook blamed a simple technical mistake made during routine maintenance for its global outage Monday.

The widespread outage Monday displayed the role the platform plays in global communication and commerce. It hit small businesses that rely on the platform for day-to-day operations and cut off access to WhatsApp users who use it to communicate.

Just after 5 p.m. ET Friday, the Instagram communications team said on Twitter that the issue was resolved.

“Thank you for bearing with us (and for all the memes this week),” the statement said.

Write to Jennifer Calfas at Jennifer.Calfas@wsj.com

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Appeared in the October 9, 2021, print edition as ‘Some Facebook Users Suffer Another Outage.’