Facebook, Instagram outage: What to know about websites and services going down
PHOENIX - In a matter of weeks, another service used by many Americans suffered an outage.
On Feb. 22, an AT&T outage left thousands of their mobile phone users without access to the network. Almost two weeks later, on March 5, users of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms experienced login issues in what appeared to be a widespread outage.
Here's what to know about outages, and what causes them.
Why do websites and services go down?
According to CloudFlare, there are a number of reasons for websites to have downtime. They range from regular maintenance work on servers where website files are located, to other issues like an overloaded server, hardware malfunctions, programming bugs and expired domain name, resulting in the web address for the website being disconnected with the site's IP address, resulting in users no longer being able to access the site via its web address.
Sometimes, websites and services could be down as a result of a cyberattack. A good recent example is the attack that affected Change Healthcare, which also impacted various pharmacies.
On X (formerly Twitter), a spokesperson for Meta wrote that "a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services." For the AT&T outage, officials with that company blamed it on "an incorrect process" that was used as the company was expanding its network.
How often do websites and services have outages?
An error message is appearing on the Instagram app as it loads on a mobile phone. (Photo by Thilina Kaluthotage/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
According to a 2016 article posted by digital sales company Spectrum Inc., an existing industry standard states that a website should be up 99% of the time. Based on the standard, the article concluded that a website should be down less than 88 hours a year.
In a separate article, the website uptimerobot.com states that the average website is down three hours per month.
What's the cost of a down website?
In their article, uptimerobot.com states that besides direct costs in terms of lost revenue, there are also indirect costs, including productivity loss, increased customer support cost, reputational damage, penalties, refunds, and lost opportunities.
The website gave an example of losses that a company can suffer from a website outage. They stated that Amazon lost $34 million in sales when its website suffered an outage in 2021. The same article also stated that Facebook suffered a $164,000 per minute revenue loss due to its hours-long outage in 2021.
What should companies do to avoid downtime?
Officials with CloudFlare say while 100% uptime can be difficult to achieve, website operators can do several things to minimize downtime, including uptime monitoring, implementing web development best practices to reduce the risk of coding bugs bringing down a website, and enabling protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that can bring down a website.