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Facebook down: Outage for hundreds of thousands of users across US

Mysterious issue with social network leaves many people without access to the website or app

Anthony Cuthbertson

Monday 12 November 2018 19:09 GMT

Related video: Coronavirus cases: The spread outside China ( )

Facebook has stopped working for users across large parts of America amid a major outage.

Visitors to the website were greeted with the message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Down Detector, a service that monitors website outages, received more than 700 reports of the social network being down on Monday, 12 November.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

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1/9How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Lock your profile down

If you haven’t done this already, do it now. In Settings, hit the Privacy tab. From here, you can control who gets to see your future posts and friends list. Choose from Public, Friends, Only Me and Custom in the dropdown menu.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Limit old posts

Annoyingly, changing this has no effect on who’s able to see your past Facebook posts. Instead, on the Privacy page, you have to click on Limit Past Posts, then select Limit Old Posts and finally hit Confirm on the pop-up.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Make yourself harder to find

You can stop completely random people from adding you by selecting Friends of Friends from the dropdown menu in the Who can send you friend requests? section of the Privacy page. It’s also worth limiting who can find your Facebook profile with your number and email address. At the bottom of the page is the option to prevent search engines outside of Facebook from linking to your profile.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Control access to your Timeline

You can limit who gets to post things on your Timeline and who gets to see posts on your Timeline too. In Settings, go to Timeline and Tagging and edit the sections you want to lock down.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Block people

When you block someone, they won’t be able to see things you post on your Timeline, tag you, invite you to events or groups, start conversations with you or add you as a friend. To do it, go to Settings and Blocking. Annoyingly, you have to block people on Messenger separately. You can also add friends to your Restricted list here, which means they’ll still be friends with you but will only be able to see your public posts and things you share on a mutual friend's Timeline.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Review tags

One of Facebook’s handiest privacy features is the ability to review posts you’re tagged in before they appear on your Timeline. They’ll still be visible on the News Feed while they’re fresh, but won’t be tied to your profile forever. In Timeline and Tagging, enable Timeline review controls.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Clean up your apps

You can view a list of all of the apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account by going to Settings and Apps. The list might be longer than you expected it to be. It’s worth tidying this up to ensure things you no longer use lose access to your personal information. If you don’t want to log into websites and apps with your facebook account, scroll down and turn Platform off.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Change your ad preferences

You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences by going to Settings and Adverts. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

Download your data

Facebook lets you download all of the data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a hell of a lot of information, which you should download to ensure you never over-share on the social network again.

Outage reports mainly stemmed from the east coast of the US, though users in Brazil, Peru and Mexico also reported issues.

Facebook's issues appear to be contained to the east coast of the United States and certain regions in Central and South America (Down Detector)

Hundreds of Facebook users also took to other social media platforms like Twitter in order to vent their frustrations.

Outages on Facebook are unusual, but with more than 2 billion users worldwide, any issues with the site can have far-reaching consequences.

A spokesperson for Facebook was not immediately available for comment.

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