Facebook, WhatsApp And Messenger Services Crash In Europe

Facebook has more bad news this week after reports began emerging Thursday morning of a significant outage for users of the platform.

Both Facebook, Messenger and Instagram reportedly suffered an outage, with users reporting on Downdetector.com that problems began around 9am GMT Thursday morning.

The problems seem to be affecting mostly users in the UK and Europe, but that should be expected as users in the United States will only start using the platform around midday UK time.

Facebook outage

Besides Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram problems, DownDetector.com also reported that WhatsApp also began displaying problems as well.

The issue appears to be mostly problems sending and receiving messages for 80 percent of the users, with the remaining 20 percent reporting problems logging in.

The problems are still ongoing as of 3pm GMT Thursday.

The outage is not the only piece of bad news for Facebook, which on Tuesday was hit with two separate antitrust lawsuits, from the Federal Trade Commission and 48 US states.

Facebook is being accused of alleged anti-competitive conduct by buying up rivals and stifle competition, and faces a significant risk of having to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp.

And this was noted by disgruntled users, who took to Twitter to complain about the outage.

“Pretty bad look for Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp to all be offline because they share the same infrastructure, the day after the US government said its a bad thing that they’re all owned by the same company,” tweeted James Titcomb.

“A major outage in Facebook Messenger brought Instagram DM with it because they are now integrated,” also noted Jane Wong.

Other outages

This is not the only time that there has been outages this year.

Facebook and Instagram suffered a six hour Thanksgiving outage in November which it blamed on blamed an issue with a “central software system”.

In April this year Facebook suffered a three hour outage, that also impacted Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram services.

That was short compared to one of Facebook’s longest outages in March, with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp going offline for more than 24 hours.