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.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger have crashed and are offline.
The issue issue is affecting desktop, mobile phone and app users.
According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 16.44 BST (11.44 ET), and are affecting users globally. Soon after the first report came through, the hashtag #facebookdown was trending on Twitter, with users worldwide reporting issues connecting.
Tens of thousands of WhatsApp users reported issues using the global instant messaging service while Mark Zuckerberg’s social giant Facebook has also been struggling, with tens of thousands of users also reporting issues there. Messenger and Instagram, which are also owned by Facebook, are also down.
Facebook is yet to comment on the outage.
