Facebook services WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger are all down right now. The company confirmed this with tweets (since Twitter is the only major social platform working right now) across its various corporate handles, including the Facebook app, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It promised that the app will be back online soon, although as of now, the company has not issued a statement about why this happened.
Facebook services appear to have been down from 9pm on Monday, according to reports on outage tracker Down Detector. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger were all persistently unavailable when Gadgets 360 staff tried to access these apps. At this early point, it’s unclear what is causing these issues, but it appears to be a global outage, as reports on Down Detector’s US website are similar. At the time of writing, Facebook’s stock also dipped five percent.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021
Judging by the reports on the site, the issue seems to have started only about half an hour ago, at 9pm; over a span of 10 minutes, there were over 18,000 reports about an outage of WhatsApp. In recent times, we’ve seen multiple outages like this due to CDN issues, with Akamai and Fastly being the two most recent incidents; most recently in July an outage took out a host of services, ranging from Zomato, to Disney+ Hotstar, PSN, Steam, Paytm and more.
However, given that the problem seems most acute with Facebook services, it might be an issue that the social media giant is facing instead. It is being speculated that the issue was caused by a DNS problem. As The Verge noted, Dane Knecht, an SVP at Cloudflare, tweeted that Facebook DNS and other services are down.
All Facebook services are unavailable right now.
Facebook has not given any details about the outage at this point, but a Facebook executive did tweet acknowledging the issue, and say that it is looking into the matter. Meanwhile users worldwide are flooding Twitter to make jokes, and even Google seems to want to join the fun.
As mentioned above, this is just the latest in a steady stream of Internet outages. On June 8 a huge chunk of the Internet was inaccessible with popular sites like Reddit, Twitch, and Amazon all affected. a major outage at Amazon impacted users around the world – not just for the Amazon e-commerce platform, but also for a huge number of sites and applications making use of its AWS platform. And in August 2020, there was a huge outage incident involving Google, which also made a huge impact.