Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Suffer Global Outage

Facebook has been rocked by a major outage of its platforms including WhatsApp and Instagram on Monday afternoon.

According to Downdetector.co.uk website, problems first began for Facebook on Monday afternoon soon after 4pm BST.

WhatsApp and Instagram have also impacted by the outages as well.

The problems are still ongoing, over 2 hours later, with Facebook and WhatsApp failing to load properly at 7.05pm BST.

Facebook aware

Problems are reported on Facebook’s virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, as well as its Messenger service.

Facebook took to Twitter, ironically, to admit it had a problem and to apologise for the outages.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” it tweeted. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

No official reason was given for the outage, but there has been speculation the outage could be down to an error with DNS (domain name system) for Facebook sites. Either that or a very serious problem at its data centre facilities.

The outage comes just days after Facebook chief technology officer (CTO) Mike Schroepfer announced his intention to step down from the role.

Mark Zuckerberg publicly thanked his outgoing CTO for the “extraordinary contributions to our community and our company over the last 13 years.”

Previous outages

Serious global outages impacting major technology platforms don’t happen all that often, but they occur more than people think.

In March this year for example, Facebook fixed a technical issue that caused worldwide outages for some of its services, after more than one million people globally reported problems with the company’s Instagram photo-sharing service.

In December 2020 Facebook suffered a major outage that affected Messenger and Instagram direct messages.

But 2019 was a bit of torrid year for Facebook, when one of Facebook’s longest outages took place in March 2019, with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp going offline for more than 24 hours.

Then in April 2019 Facebook suffered a three hour outage, that also impacted Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram services.

Facebook and Instagram were also hit by major outages over Thanksgiving in 2019.