Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are down for some users for some unknown reason

Facebook and its sister services, Instagram and WhatsApp are down for some users for some unknown reason. The issue doesn’t seem to be an outage of sorts, and it isn’t as widespread globally, as past instances as well – which makes it kind of surprising to say the least. The issue seems pre-dominantly centered in Europe, the US, South America and Japan, and effecting random aspects of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.  

Facebook users, for instance, have been reporting of failures to view specific posts or photos even as their page may load successfully. Instagram users similarly have been reporting that they’re being unable to make new posts. WhatsApp users meanwhile are not being able to send files even as normal chats may be working just fine.  

Facebook is yet to formally confirm the issue(s) even as its Platform Status page indicates the service is healthy, as we speak.    

UPDATE: Facebook has now acknowledged the issue(s) and said it's working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

The outage comes just a few months after Facebook experienced its worst outage ever in history – an outage that took Facebook nearly 24 hours to fix. That issue was caused by a server configuration change, according to Facebook, and was so critical, it also affected gameplay for the owners of the company’s Oculus VR headsets. Tinder and Spotify that use Facebook to login were also affected.  

Facebook was similarly knocked down in 2008 by a bug that affected as many as 80 million users. 

It’s too early to pin-point the cause of the fresh issue(s) but such issues (server related or otherwise) aren’t new for social media platforms – or for that matter, anything related to general tech. Things are slightly different when Facebook is at the center of it all though. Facebook is reeling under pressure over a string of privacy scandals and it is working to merge WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The issue(s) could be part of that ongoing integration for all we know. Hopefully, Facebook would have something to say about it soon enough.  

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