Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Are All Down [Update: It's Coming Back, Sorry]

Update 5:45 PM, ET: Well, it looks like Facebook’s finally starting to show signs of life again—a full six hours after its systems got borked. The company’s status page is officially back online, though each product listed is reported to be suffering “major disruptions.” Meanwhile, Cloudflare is reporting that the platform has resolved some of the backend issues that led to this outage in the first place.

Some folks reading this will undoubtedly be overjoyed to have their platforms back, but for the rest of us, it’s just a reminder that we’re all stuck with Facebook, whether we like it or not.

See the original story below.

In the wake of one of the worst PR crises Facebook’s faced in recent years, all of the company’s platforms—Facebook proper, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are suffering mysterious outages on Monday morning. (See updates below.)

Gizmodo was able to confirm that Instagram’s platform flashed up a “couldn’t load posts” message when trying to access people’s pages, while Facebook’s newsfeed simply... refused to load. DownDetector, meanwhile, confirmed that WhatsApp has been experiencing outages in the US and abroad, with users in Russia, Barcelona, and Trinidad all reporting that their access has been shut off.

WhatsApp was the first to publicly note that something was indeed Up. “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment,” the company tweeted out shortly after reports of the outages first went live. “We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.” Not long after, Facebook pubbed a near-identical statement on its own Twitter account.

Per DownDetector, WhatsApp—along with every other service named here—seem to have experienced their respective outage around 11:40 AM, ET.

It’s also worth noting that all of the usual channels that Facebook typically uses to report platform issues were also knocked offline on Monday morning. These include the page where Facebook’s third-party developers publicly disclose potential platform issues as they emerge and the page where Facebook’s own engineers do the same. As of this writing, both are still inaccessible. So, if any of you are trying to get in contact with any of these platforms, it ironically seems like Twitter might be your best bet.

Facebook itself hasn’t publicly disclosed any word about the cause of the outages, or when we can expect those services can be expected back online. Right now, folks in cybersecurity circles seem to be pointing to a DNS (domain name service) issue as the potential culprit.

We’ve reached out to the company for comment. In the meantime, it looks like we’ll need to leave our shitposts on Twitter for now.

This is a developing story and we’ll update this post as we learn more…