Facebook In and its subsidiaries WhatsApp, Instagram & Messenger have been down for hours stopped millions of users from having access to their favorite social media apps. All three apps are owned by Facebook, and as a result, use the same infrastructure and all stopped functioning properly around 18:00 CEST (17:00 BST, and 12:00 ET).
The error message appearing on Facebook.com throughout the day read: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” WhatsApp was the first to fail – initially the web version, then the phone app, before Facebook and Instagram followed suit, leaving users unable to view their messages or feeds on the three social networks. The outage wasn’t concentrated on one region either, with reports of issues throughout the USA, UK, and Europe, as well as Latin America. But there are alternatives to WhatsApp you can use.
Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.
According to Al Jazeera, the outage comes as Facebook is facing mounting pressure in the US after a leaked internal investigation showed the social media giant was aware of how it’s Instagram app harmed the mental health of teenagers. In a series of articles, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) newspaper reported that Facebook knew its Instagram platform caused some teenagers, girls in particular, to feel bad about their self-image. The company has rejected the reports as a distortion of the probe’s findings.
We care deeply about the safety and security of the people on our platform. We have put in place multiple protections to create safe and age-appropriate experiences for people between the ages of 13 and 17.
Facebook’s Head of Global Security, Antigone Davis, said during a Senate subcommittee hearing last week.
The last time the three Facebook-owned networks went down was on March 19, 2021, and on that occasion, it took a couple of hours for the sites to regain proper functionality.
Facebook Inc has said it is working to restore access to its social media platforms, including photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, after an apparent global outage.
