Facebook down globally and in Malaysia too

If you, like many other users, regularly tune into to Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild Facebook for your daily dose of news, social updates and the like and discovered that it is, for lack of a better word, down, you’re not alone nor is it the fault of your phone, telco service provider or modem. There really is a global outage that’s happening right now. Yes, Facebook is down.

According to DownDetector, the Facebook down problems first started at 6.28AM EDT which is about 6.30PM in Kuala Lumpur. The hotspots listed on the map seem to be clustered on a good chunk of the eastern seaboard of the United States, parts of Europe, the Philippines, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Jakarta and, alas for us, Malaysia.

Comments have flooded the DownDetector website, listing a veritable deluge of despair as users comment where the Facebook service has gone offline.

A host of comments on Down Detector as users across the globe report on the outage in their areas

Problems started cropping up on our desktop Facebook feed about that time with longer and longer load times before being unable to access it entirely and missed messages on Facebook Messenger.

At the time of writing, the desktop version of Facebook is unavailable and pinging the Facebook server results in lost packets. Oddly enough, the mobile version of Facebook is still accessible at this point in time though Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger remain on hiatus.

We also experienced problems accessing Whatsapp and Instagram as well with messages not arriving to their intended recipients. To provide context, Facebook also owns Whatsapp and Instagram.

This looks like a repeat of the Facebook down outage that happened in 2017 though it looks like it’s happening in a far wider and more serious fashion. We’ll keep you posted on any updates and if the service comes back online but in the meantime, it may just be a good time to smell the roses, take a walk to the local mall and catch up on a few movies or two.

UPDATE: Services have been restored for Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram for both mobile and desktop versions at about 9.30PM or so Malaysia time so it’s back to the usual. Happy posting folks!