24hrs of Internet Disaster As Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, CloudFlare Go Down

It has been over twenty-four hours of disaster for the internet, as most internet services including WhatsAPP, Facebook and Instagram have experienced glitches that has impacted millions of users worldwide.

IT STARTED WITH CLOUDFLARE

Yesterday at about 2:00 GMT CloudFlare, a popular reverse proxy that provides content delivery network (CDN) services to over fifteen million websites worldwide went down. Millions of websites including thewhistler.ng which relies on Cloudflare services were unreachable to users serving a “502 Gateway Error.”.

Ironically even DownDetector, a website used to monitor uptime and downtime of web service was also affected by this incident.

Reacting to the outage, Cloudflare CEO Mathew Prince in a tweet assured users the outage wasn’t as a result of denial of service attack (DDOS) as widely speculated but a “Massive spike in CPU usage caused primary and backup systems to fall over. Impacted all Services”

Although normalcy returned in a little less than 30 minutes from the time we noticed the outage, the company said it is investigating the root cause of the failure through an update published on its CloudflareStatus website.

“Major outage impacted all Cloudflare services globally. We saw a massive spike in CPU that caused primary and secondary systems to fall over. We shut down the process that was causing the CPU spike. Service restored to normal within ~30 minutes. We’re now investigating the root cause of what happened.”

THEN FACEBOOK, WHATSAPP, INSTAGRAM WENT DOWN

Today, at about 2:00 GMT, users of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram started experiencing glitches that affected sending and receiving pictures. Incidentally, all the Social media apps affected by this glitch are owned by Facebook Inc.

Over 5 billion active users who rely on these apps are currently affected worldwide. Meanwhile, the company in a statement said; “We’re working on a fix and will follow up as soon as we have an update for you.”.

For now, most people have turned to Twitter, a micro-blogging social network to express their frustrations using the hashtags #Instagramdown and #facebookdown.

We will continue to monitor the situation and report on updates.