Facebook and Instagram Photos Go Down Globally
Facebook was hit with a major outage today as users around the world reported photos not uploading and displaying correctly. The outage also affected Facebook-owned apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
Starting at around 10am EST (7am PST), users of Facebook and Instagram began reporting that photos weren’t showing up after being uploaded.
Many photos were replaced with broken image icons, but since Facebook includes AI-generated descriptions of photos for the visually impaired, many photos were also replaced with text descriptions.
Has anyone else noticed on their Facebook profile under photos showing what’s in the attached picture? That’s kinda creepy for Facebook to attach a description of each pic and who’s in it and what they are doing in the pic. 😮 Big Brother is watching us!!! pic.twitter.com/Jvv5wgyNos
— Rando from Mempho (@randocox) July 3, 2019
The text description of this broken Facebook photo is also true of about 90% of the photos on my phone. #ImageMayContainDog #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/7JfGbIT4Wp
— Geoff Wood (@geoffwood) July 3, 2019
Oh yeah! I forgot Facebook uses machine learning to tag our photos with what it sees in the picture.
To be fair, "one person, beard" is pretty much a spot-on description of me. pic.twitter.com/fCpydUxtpz
— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) July 3, 2019
Downdetector reports that “Pictures” has been the most reported problem, and its outage map shows reports flooding in from all over the world.
Facebook and Instagram soon acknowledged that they were experiencing issues… via Twitter:
We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We're sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #facebookdown
— Facebook (@facebook) July 3, 2019
We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images and videos on Instagram. We're sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #instagramdown
— Instagram (@instagram) July 3, 2019
The outage has been going on for over three hours so far, at the time of this writing.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps,” Facebook writes. “We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
