WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage.
The three apps which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure all completely stopped working shortly before 5 pm. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.
Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.
The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues and does not tend to give reasons even after they are fixed.
Facebook is yet to comment on the outage. However, WhatsApp acknowledged the outage and said that they are “working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”
”We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience,” WhatsApp said