WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook services are down in a major network outage. Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect.
WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook stop working
All three applications, which are owned by Facebook and run on a shared infrastructure, stopped working shortly before 9 a.m. PT. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
Visitors to Facebook’s 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 display new content, including messages sent or received during the problems.
Facebook outages happen relatively infrequently, but they tend to have a big impact, especially since they affect three of the world’s largest apps.
The company is often cryptic about the causes of the problems and does not usually explain them even after they are fixed. In 2019, for example, it suffered its biggest outage in years, and said only that it was “triggered by a problem” during “routine maintenance operations.”
In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that such outages are a “big problem.”
Any problem can often lead people to start using competitors, and he noted that it can take “months” to regain trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms, if they return at all.
- Facebook Messenger