'We're back'? Facebook struggles into day 2 of global outage

Bengaluru - Number of reports on DownDetector peaks at just over 12,000

Facebook struggled to restore its services fully on Thursday after a 17-hour partial outage made the world's largest social network inaccessible to users across the globe, driving a wave of online complaints.
The number of reports on the crowd-sourced DownDetector website - one of the Internet's most used sources of numbers on outages - peaked at just over 12,000, gradually falling to a couple of hundreds by early Thursday.
But with thousands of users complaining on Twitter under the hashtag #facebookdown, a number of media reports put the number affected in the millions.
The BBC and a handful of other media outlets said it was the platform's longest ever outage. Reuters was not immediately able to verify those claims. Facebook representatives took to Twitter to update users on the problems.
A Facebook spokesman, asked by Reuters for more details, would only repeat the company's initial statement on the outage on Wednesday, saying that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps were down for much of Wednesday, although the photo-sharing social network said it was back up early on Thursday. Facebook was yet to provide an update on its other services.
"Anddddd... we're back," Instagram tweeted with a GIF image of Oprah Winfrey screaming in excitement. Social media users in some parts of the United States and Europe as well as in Japan were hit by the disruption, according to DownDetector's live outage map.
"Ya'll, I haven't gotten my daily dosage of dank memes and I think that's why I'm cranky. #FacebookDown," tweeted Mayra Mesina, a Facebook user.
More probes
Meanwhile, US federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world's largest technology companies, the New York Times reported.
A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the requests and without naming the companies.
Both companies are among the more than 150, including Amazon.com, Apple and Microsoft, that have entered into partnerships with Facebook for access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users, according to the report.
In addition to looking at the data deals, the probes focus on disclosures that the company shared the user data of 87 million people with British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.