The world’s most popular social media platform is Facebook. It seems as though, at this point, life without Facebook is impossible. It’s become an important part of our lives. And waking up to see that Facebook is down, can be an annoying feeling. Users all around the globe have been reporting that the Facebook platform may be down. Or that they are unable to see notifications at all.
Some of these people happen to face an issue where they are unable to see the newsfeed section. Nonetheless, a fix was implemented 4 hours after it had happened. To find out more about Facebook not working, read below!
Is Facebook Down: What Exactly Happens!
So, “is facebook down”? Recently, the world faced an outage problem, where Facebook was down for more than 2 hours. The analysis says that it was the longest outage until now. The cause of this sudden trigger was a failure in the automation system. Apparently, there was an error in the configuration values. It ended up crashing and as a result, Facebook went down.
What happens, that the automation system is built to detect invalid values present in the cache. If found any, they get replaced with the values that are updated. However, this can only work if the persistent store is not invalid.
Is Facebook Down: What are the Signs to know Facebook not working?
If you are not sure that Facebook is really down or there are some issues with your system or account, you can find out using the following way:
- The first thing to do is to try opening Facebook. You can tell by its home page if it is down or not.
- The Facebook platform page will have a status that tells you that it is down.
- Another thing to check if Facebook is really down or not is when you search for “#facebookdown” on twitter. When you do that, you can refer to the timestamp posted by other people’s tweets. If they are recent, like a minute or hour ago, then be sure that Facebook is really down.
- On the other hand, you can consider using an online status checker to verify if Facebook is down or not. Simply go to the status checker and enter the URL of Facebook. It will tell you whether Facebook is working or not.
If you come to find that you are not getting any results using the aforementioned ways, then it could be that the problem is on your end.
Here’s What to do, If Facebook not Working!
If Facebook is working fine but to you, it seems Facebook not working or it’s down, then you can try doing the following things to make it work:
1. Check the Authenticity of Facebook Website
The first thing to check is if you are using the correct website to access the Facebook page and not a fake website. These days, many websites come up using the original domain or a site with minor changes. These websites are fake and may be harmful to the system.
2. Use the Facebook App
And the same applies to the Facebook application. Make sure you are using the right application to access Facebook. If you are unable to access the Facebook website from PC, try opening it from the Facebook application.
Also, try opening it from a different smartphone or tablet.
3. Re-Open Browser
Another thing you can try doing is closing the browsing the current session. It could be that the browser is having issues. And this method works like a charm for anything. Simply exit the browser. And then re-open it again.
Now go to the address bar, type the URL of Facebook and hit the “Enter” button. Check if you can access Facebook now. If you can then you know the problem was with the browser. If not, you can try some other ways too.
4. Flush out Cache from the Web Browser
Cache gets accumulated over the course of time. That can cause some websites to not show up while accessing. To clear it off, do the following steps below:
Go to the top section of the browser, and then click on the “Settings” button, which appears to have three dots on the right corner of the browser.
In the “Settings” option, go down to the end of it and select the option called “Advanced”. Now, in “Advanced” among the list of all the options, select the one called “Privacy & Security”. From there, click on the option called “Clear browsing data”.
Under that, there is a box called “Cached images & files”. In there, select the option called “Clear data”. Now that the cache and browsing data has been flushed out, exit the browser and re-open it. Now try accessing Facebook and check if you can or not.
5. Clear Browser Cookies
Cookies are also of the major reasons that cause the problem. It could be that due to excess browser cookies, you are unable to access Facebook. So, to clear the, do the following steps:
Agin, open the web browser, go to its “Settings” and from there, click on the option called “Privacy”. Or you can also try clicking on the option called “History”. You can also go to “Privacy” using the “Ctrl, Delete and the Shift key.
Or just go “Settings” then go to the option called “More Tools”. Now, in there, select the option called “Cookies & Other Site Data”. Now select the option called “Time Range” so that you can clear the cookies from all times. So for that, select the option called “All Time”. Finally, choose the option called “Clear Data”.
6. Scan the System for Malware
You may not realize but malware could also potentially affect any browsing session. Possibly that’s why Facebook is unable to come upon accessing. To check if it is malware that is triggering the issue, here’s what you can do:
Simply open an Anti-virus program and then scan the whole system along with its files. Check if the program detects any malware. If any found, put them in the quarantine zone or remove it completely from the system. Then, re-open the browser and access Facebook.
7. Restart the System
Here’s one last thing you can do. If everything has failed, you can simply try re-opening the system.
Go to the “Start” panel and then click on the option called “Restart” on the right corner of the menu. Make sure you close all programs before restarting. Wait until the system is on again. Then open the web browser and try accessing Facebook.
How Facebook Team Fixed the Issue!
When Facebook did go down, the team decided to come up with a fix as soon as possible. So, the Facebook team decided to make changes in the persistent copy which seemed to have invalid configuration values.
The team also decided to block the traffic that was going to the cluster of the database. As a result, to do this, they had to take down the website altogether. The reason why it took so long was that the issue was with the database.
As soon as the team recovered the database, the site started working. This allowed people to access the website gradually. As of now, the team has mentioned that they look forward to introducing a more enhanced mechanism to deal with transient spikes as well as feedback loops.