Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Down For Many Users
A message on Facebook’s Twitter account acknowledged the issues. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Facebook and other applications owned by the social media giant were down for a significant number of users Monday.
Hundreds of thousands of users trying to access Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger reported outages, according to Downdetector.
A message on Facebook’s Twitter account acknowledged the issues. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer for cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, said in a Twitter post that Facebook and related properties “disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates.”
Between 15:50 UTC and 15:52 UTC Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates. This is what it looked like to @Cloudflare. pic.twitter.com/PFw5FR2W5j
— John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) October 4, 2021
Facebook representatives did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
At 3:52 p.m. ET, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted: “*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible[.]”
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Earlier in the day, WhatsApp’s Twitter account posted: “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!”
A Twitter account for Instagram published the message: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown.”
Instagram and WhatsApp’s main pages on a desktop browser app displayed a “5xx Server Error” message on a white screen. Facebook’s main page showed the message “Sorry, something went wrong. We‘re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
Messages sent through the WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger mobile app appeared not to go through Monday.
On Facebook’s latest quarterly earnings call in July, the company reported daily active users of 1.91 billion on its flagship social media network. The company did not break out numbers for WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
At the outage’s peak at 11:52 a.m. ET Monday, 125,375 users reported an issue with Facebook, according to Downdetector. As of 12:55 p.m. ET, nearly 70,000 users reported an issue with the platform.
The outage comes a day after a blockbuster “60 Minutes” report revealing a whistleblower accusing Facebook of dismantling guardrails protecting the public good.
Facebook stock was down more than 5 percent Monday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Facebook users took to Twitter to vent about the outage, using the the hashtag “#facebookdown.”
Mark Zuckerberg tech team currently be like...#facebookdown #WhatsAppDown pic.twitter.com/FgGAr92tqq
— Savage (@NaijaSavager) October 4, 2021
Whatsapp,Facebook Instagram are down.
Meanwhile at twitter Headquarters:#facebookdown #instagramdisabled #whatsappdown pic.twitter.com/8dKh3xfOdt
— Meaty Mané (@MeatyXtra) October 4, 2021