Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger — all Facebook services seem to be experiencing outages around the world. Many users have been posting on Twitter about not being able to log into any of the Facebook services, and Gadgets 360 staff also found that we can’t send messages on WhatsApp, or open the other sites. According to website outage tracker Downdetector, the problems started to be noticed by users at around 10.30pm IST on Friday, March 19.
Less than an hour later, there are already almost 40,000 reports on the tracker for WhatsApp. A similar trend can be seen for all other Facebook services including Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, apart from the main social network itself. The issue isn’t just limited to the websites either — the apps for these platforms are also not working
WhatsApp errors started at around 10.30pm and suddenly spiked, and so did other Facebook apps
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Downdetector
Since then, many people have been tweeting about problems with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Looking at the map on Downdetector, it doesn’t appear to be a problem with any one region, but is impacting people around the world.
At this moment, there are not many other details about why the service is down, but this is not the first time in recent months that Facebook has been down — just a few months ago, all Facebook services were down for several hours in December 2020.
Facebook’s own downtime dashboard does not reflect any issues at the moment, but its 90 days history also marked some issues in January apart from the major outage in December.
Users around the world are making jokes, trying to guess what caused the outage, and just venting on Twitter, but at this point, it’s not clear when the social network and its various services will be back. This highlights something else that’s worth noting — as we’ve become more and more reliant on Facebook’s services, particularly WhatsApp to drive not just updates and funny cat pictures, but build entire businesses and communities on, outages like these can actually be quite.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users coming to Twitter pic.twitter.com/k00iUUfZgs
— Turi💭 (@_turi69) March 19, 2021
well damn, facebook, whatsapp and instagram down, @YourAnonCentral is that you?
— Jilly (@jillivanilli) March 19, 2021