Facebook and Instagram are suffering from far more downtime than rival social networks

It’s not just you: Facebook and Instagram are definitely crashing more than they used to.

The two Facebook-owned social networks have experienced a dramatic spike in outages over the last 12 months, data shared with Business Insider by downtime-monitoring service Downdetector shows – contributing to frustration among the company’s 2.7 billion users around the world, who rely on Facebook’s services to do everything from communicate with their friends to support their businesses and put food on the table.

Instagram’s downtime over the first six months of 2019 has almost doubled compared to the same time period a year previously, jumping 90%. And for Facebook, the spike is even more severe – nearly quadrupling, hitting 281%.

Downdetector doesn’t release its records of total hours of recorded downtime for any given service, but it shared with Business Insider indexed data that directly corresponds to downtime, and that allows for comparisons in downtime between different internet services.

The data shows that rival services like Snapchat and Twitter have stayed relatively stable in their uptime, with the exception of a notable Snapchat outage in June 2019 that was caused by a broader Google Cloud technical issue, and a period downtime for Twitter on Thursday that occurred after the data was compiled.

The findings confirms growing suspicions that Facebook’s services have become less reliable lately. And the surge in outages comes as Facebook attempts to move past two years of ugly scandals, and is working on an ambitious project to knit its core messaging apps (Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs) closer together in a “pivot to privacy.”

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We strive to give the 2.7 billion people that use our products and services the best experience possible across our family of apps. At times, we experience temporary disruption in service. We work quickly to identify the issue and fix the problem at hand and restore service.”

The spokesperson declined to comment on the outage data.

Source: BusinessInsider