Recently, a worldwide outage affected Facebook and other apps under it. This includes its Messenger app, Instagram and WhatsApp. In case you did not know, though, there are tools available online to check if an outage occurred.
The said Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours, which annoyed several social media users. Luckily, Twitter was not affected by the said outage.
While Twitter was not affected, it is important to note that it could also experience the same issues. Fortunately, it also has a feature to check if an outage occured.
Keep in mind that these tools will not prevent any outage, but rather, it will help users track and stay up to date if the problem is already resolved.
Are Facebook and Twitter Down? Use Application Programming Interface (API)
During the time of the Facebook outage, the social media giant reached out to its users through Twitter.
Aside from Twitter, though, Facebook also has its own platform status webpage which can be accessed anytime. This webpage is called Application Programming Interface or API, and it provides details of certain issues that occurred on the platform. Since API is handled by Facebook, though, it was also affected by the said outage and cannot be opened.
Facebook's API webpage has graphs to show different concerns. These graphs are API Response Time, API Error Rate and Webhook Delay Time. The webpage also contains Platform Status that indicates if the issue is already resolved. For a detailed explanation, the platform status has a drop-down button. The said button contains updates for the issue occurrence.
As of writing, Facebook's platform status includes the following:
- Resolved status: This feature helps users to determine if the issue is already addressed.
- Recovering from disruptions: From the word "recovery" itself, Facebook uses this feature to update users if the App is recovering from the issue.
- Major disruption: This feature informs user if a problem is detected.
Aside from this, Twitter also has the same API which determines if there are any partial or complete outages that occurred. As compared to Facebook's API, Twitter has a much-detailed information report. Reports of each status include the following: Operational, Degraded Performance, Partial Outage, Major Outage, and Maintenance.
The said status reports will determine the occurences of the following major issues:
- Media endpoints
- Enterprise Volume Streams
- Enterprise Usage API
- Standard endpoints
- Premium billing
- Standard statuses/update endpoints
- Ads API
- Twitter Developer Labs
Same with Facebook, there are also recorded dates for the incident happened. Last October 4, Twitter has encountered some issues. The recent incident was reported into three parts: Resolved, Monitoring and Investigating. The said report has similarities on how Facebook reports its incident, the only difference is that Twitter has a much-detailed report.
As of writing, Twitter stated that all its systems are operational. This only means that there are no issues detected.
Downdetector
Aside from Facebook and Twitter's API, Downdetector's webpage also works almost the same with API. This webpage has its own way to report outages. Through Downdetector's time chart, it states any outages within a 24-hour period.
Aside from this, Downdetector also reports outages on each device, from a website to Apple and Android devices. In addition, it also has a discussion thread for everyone who encounters issues.
Downdetector also works for other apps such as Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Netflix, Google Meet and more.
To download Downdetector for Android, go to this website. Apple users must proceed to this page to get it.
