WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage

The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.

Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work, but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.

Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.

The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues, and does not tend to explain them even after they are fixed. In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.

In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg note that such outages are a “big deal”. Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.

Update 1: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram acknowledge downtime, new info on why

The official Twitter accounts of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have acknowledged that their services have gone dark. The reason all of these services are down, according to journalist Brian Krebs, is because the DNS records that tell systems how to navigate to them has been withdrawn from global routing tables. Why this happened is still unknown, as Facebook should be in control over its own DNS records.

Update 2: Facebook shows signs of life

Parts of Facebook are slowly coming back online.  However, things are very slow at the moment, and other services like Instagram and WhatsApp still seem to be down. We’ll continue monitoring the situation and will update this post as soon as the services are back online.

Update 3: Instagram and Messenger are back online

After several hours, Facebook has brought back more of its core services. The main website appears to be functioning for many people, and Instagram and Messenger also appear to be back online. WhatsApp, however, appears to still have issues, though we’ve seen it intermittently come back for some users.

For those wondering what happened, this blog post from Cloudflare does a great job at explaining how Facebook basically disappeared off the face of the Internet. To find out exactly what led to this situation, we’ll have to wait for the company’s own internal investigation into the issue. However, cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reports that the issue stemmed from “a routine BGP update gone wrong”, as the update “blocked remote users from reverting changes” and people with physical access “didn’t have network/logical access” to revert it.

Update 4: WhatsApp is back online

Multiple users around the world are reporting that WhatsApp is back online, and messages are finally going through. It may take a few minutes for the service to be restored in your area, so keep checking!

Update 5: Facebook says sorry 

In a Facebook post, Facebook says sorry to people and businesses around the world who depend on its services and announced the restoration of all services. 

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