UPDATE: Facebook’s services are now coming back online after a relatively lengthy outage on Friday evening. WhatsApp and Instagram appear to be operating as normal now after they went offline for around 45 minutes. Messenger is now up and running too.
It isn’t clear what caused the outage, but it was large enough to take down four of the most popular apps on the planet, albeit all running on the same infrastructure.
Facebook hasn’t officially commented on the matter, but it’s gaming arm cited a “number of issues” affecting users, while Instagram tweeted to say problems accessing by feeds experienced by some users had now been resolved.
Thanks for your patience, that was a long 45 minutes but we are back! #WhatsAppDown
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) March 19, 2021
There are a number of issues currently affecting Facebook products, including gaming streams. Multiple teams are working on it, and we'll update you when we can.
— Facebook Gaming (@FacebookGaming) March 19, 2021
Some people were having issues with their Instagram accounts earlier, but we're back now. The issue's been fixed and we're sorry for the trouble. #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/dd9mJPiqDz
— Instagram (@instagram) March 19, 2021
Original story appears below…
The Facebook-owned suite of hugely popular apps – including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – appear to be experiencing widespread outages on Friday evening.
Widespread reports on social media and the Down Detector web service are showing significant outages across the range of services operated by the social media giant.
The crowd-sourced Down Detector site currently shows the Facebook services as the four most affected services, with the respective graphs showing identical spikes.
At the time of writing, mobile and web services for the aforementioned apps appear to be down. Here at Trusted Reviews we were unable to send Messenger messages, connect to WhatsApp or refresh our Instagram feed on mobile or on the web. We were able to post a test Facebook status update at Facebook.com.
Related: How to delete Facebook
None of the services affected have issued a statement on the outage, via their Twitter accounts, as yet. We’ll be keeping an eye on this developing story throughout the evening.
WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram are all down – it's almost as if monopolies are a bad idea.
— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) March 19, 2021
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
