Facebook started off the week with one heck of a blunder, watching all of its services go down worldwide for over six hours. Now, to close out the week, Facebook-owned Instagram had another large-scale outage that lasted multiple hours. People started to notice issues with Instagram not loading or refreshing around 2 p.m. ET, and the problems seemed to be sporadic — but a wave of reports made it clear there was a mojor problem.
Over on Twitter, both #instagramdownagain and #instadown were trending for the duration. That doesn’t happen for a small or short blip.
Though there were some reports of Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp being down, triggering comments from those who dealt with Monday’s issues, that ended up being more of a coincidence than anything noteworthy. Facebook confirmed the outage and referred to a “configuration change” as the culprit — though this was apparently a different configuration problem than what knocked everything out just a few days ago.
And that much was clear as we assessed the situation today. Unlike Monday’s whole-network outage, this problem with Instagram isn’t a complete blackout; some people were hit, and others had a relatively short delay in getting up-to-date content in their apps.
After the week Facebook just had, things can only get better, right?
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.