Agency Reporter
Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram have gone down for millions of users in a massive global outage.
Problems with the services, which are all owned by Facebook, began around 4:45pm BST (11:45am EST), according to online outage trackers.
Hundreds of thousands of people have reported issues with the social networking apps on the website DownDetector.
Many are reporting that they are unable to access the smartphone apps and websites of the hugely popular services.
Those attempting to open the sites on desktop are reportingly being met with a black white page and a message that reads “500 server error”.
The iOS and Android versions of the Instagram and Facebook apps will open but will not load users’ feeds or show them new content.
WhatsApp messages are not reaching their recipients, with sent texts sitting with a clock icon next to them to indicate that they haven’t been dispatched.
It remains unclear precisely what’s behind the mass outage.
Facebook’s head of communications, Andy Stone, tweeted: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp commonly experience small individual outages, but it’s rare for the apps to all go down at once.
They run on a shared infrastructure, and other Facebook-owned services are also down, including the Oculus website and Facebook Workplace.
Previous mass web blackouts in March 2021 and July 2019 have knocked all of the company’s services offline for hours at a time.
On those occasions, Facebook blamed a technical fault on the downtime.
According to analyst Jake Moore, it’s likely the latest outage is the result of a software bug or human error.
“Outages are increasing in volume and can often point towards a cyber-attack, but this can add to the confusion early on when we are diagnosing the causes,” said Moore, a specialist at cybersecurity firm ESET.
(THE U.S. Sun)
