Facebook and Instagram are slowly returning to users across the world following a major outage on Monday.
Billions of people across the world were without access to popular social media sites Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
This after the Facebook Inc. owned applications went offline sometime after 10 this morning for almost 7-hours.
The applications together have approximately 6 billion active users worldwide, 1.5 million of those are said to be in Jamaica.
Facebook stocks fell sharply on Monday as the site’s longest outage since 2008 dragged into its seventh hour.
This is the company’s worst showing on the stock markets in nearly a year.
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerburg, lost more than $7 billion of his personal fortune as the outage persisted.
The Facebook domain was removed from the Internet, marking a new development in the platform’s deactivation.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer, issued an apology to users on Twitter.
He says Facebook sincerely apologises to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services.
Mr. Schroepfer said the company was experiencing networking issues and that teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore the platform.
The mass outage follows a whistle blower’s release of scores of internal Facebook documents detailing what she says is the company’s repeated pattern of prioritizing what are known as social media hits over public safety on its platforms.
The whistle blower, Frances Haugen, is scheduled to testify before a committee of the US Congress tomorrow.
Facebook has pushed back against her allegations.
There’s no word on whether the leak of the confidential documents is linked to today’s mass outage.
More in this report from Sky News in Australia.
‘Dark Day for Small Businesses in Jamaica’
Meanwhile, local communications and marketing strategist, Corve DaCosta, is describing the global Facebook outage as a dark day for small businesses in Jamaica.
Several businesses in the country depend on Facebook and Instagram advertising to market their goods and products to customers.
Mr. DaCosta says these companies will now have to pivot in their marketing.
The communications strategist says he hopes that individuals and businesses will realize that over reliance on the large social media platforms for communications and marketing can lead to losses.
Corve DaCosta, Communications and Marketing Strategist.
He was speaking on Monday with Nationwide News.
BIP Surge in Downloads
Regional telecommunications giant, Digicel, is reporting that its social messaging app BIP has seen a 180 per cent increase in downloads on Monday.
This after popular messaging app WhatsApp was offline for seven hours.
BIP, trended on Twitter, the only major social networking site, besides Telegram, that remained online.
Several users took to Twitter saying they would now have to rely on either BIP or Telegram to stay in touch.
Users of Apple’s iPhone, boasted of having connection via the company’s messaging service, iMessage.
There is no word yet when the major outage of Facebook apps will come to an end.
