• Facebook & its four primary smartphone applications have been suffering from severe outages throughout the world since March 13, 2019, 12 pm EST.
   
• While the outage was the longest ever experienced by the social media giant, company spokesperson denied it being a cyberattack.

Facebook Inc., (Facebook), the world-renowned social networking giant, has reportedly been bogged down by a severe outage that rendered social media users across the world incapable of accessing their respective accounts.

Reports cite, Facebook & its four primary smartphone applications, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, had been encountering these problems since 13th March 2019, 12 pm EST. the issues appear to be, at the moment, concentrated across the Americas & Europe.

According to a report by The Sun, several thousand people complained about the problems faced by the smartphone apps on Down Detector, a website that records outages. While pages & posts remained visible to users, they could not interact with or update them. Meanwhile, numerous WhatsApp users complained that they were unable to send any picture-based messages.

A Facebook spokesperson, Tom Parnell reportedly stated that the company is aware of the ongoing problems that the users are facing and that company engineers are currently working on resolving the issues as soon as possible. Parnell further added that the company is focused on fixing the problem as quickly as possible, it can confirm that the outage is not, in any way, related to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

For the record, a DDoS attack is a cyberattack that allows its perpetrators to flood a particular website or a platform with a massive amount of virtual traffic which eventually becomes unmanageable for the servers, causing them to shut down.

Meanwhile, another technology giant, Google was also affected by an outage through the world with users reporting problems with Google Maps, Gmail, Hangouts & Google Drive for several hours.

According to reports, Facebook has not disclosed what exactly is causing the problems and which areas were affected.