Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffer a global outage, some services restored

Social media giant Facebook and its photo-sharing app Instagram just suffered one of the biggest global outages that the platforms have seen so far. Although now you can open the two platforms and some services on Facebook and Instagram have been restored, a few hours back, this was not the case. Scores of users across the globe reported that they faced issues when they tried to use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and in some cases, even WhatsApp. In some cases, Oculus VR users also faced issues.

While for some people took it as a digital detox, some felt really helpless without all these forms of communication. The latter is particularly true for those who could not access WhatsApp. While the instant messenger worked fine in a number of countries in the world, it suffered an outage in India, Paraguay, Bangladesh, Argentina and more. According to DownDetector, the app suffered the most severe outage in Brazil.

Speaking of Messenger, we should add here that reports suggest that the mobile app worked fine, but the service did not work on the desktop version. Instagram’s outage was far worse. Some users could not load posts on the feed and the Instagram Stories did not load. Even the button to post new content and the Direct Messages option did not been working.

Facebook and Instagram took to Twitter to announce that they are aware of the issues in their services and are working to fix them.

The photo-sharing app wrote, “We’re aware of an issue impacting people’s access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP.”

We’re aware of an issue impacting people's access to Instagram right now. We know this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to resolve this ASAP.

— Instagram (@instagram) March 13, 2019

On the other hand, Facebook said, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.

— Facebook (@Facebook) March 13, 2019

According to DownDetector, the outages were spread across New England, Texas, Seattle, Washington, parts of Latin America, Peru, the UK, India, and the Philippines. However, media reports suggest that users in Canada, Las Vegas, and Turkey also faced the same problem.

That’s not all. There were users who took to social media to say that when they attempted to sign in to apps like Tinder and Spotify using Facebook, they couldn’t do that successfully. When they tried, an error popped up saying that the feature isn’t available right now. However, the ones who had already signed into Spotify were not logged out because of the outage.