Facebook has all gone down in a major outage.
WhatsApp and Instagram users have also reported crashes and issues.
The three apps are all owned by Facebook and operate on a shared infrastructure.
All of the sites reportedly stopped working around 11:40 am ET. 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.
The outage is affecting every Facebook-owned platform, according to data on Downdetector and Twitter. This includes Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. The outages appear to have started around 11:40 am ET/8:40 am PT and all of those services remain inaccessible.
The outages quickly started trending on Twitter as users flocked to the competing social network to check to see if other users were affected by the down time. Humorously, the hashtag “#DeleteFacebook” is also trending on Twitter as the company battles continued pushback against the effects its platforms have on younger users.
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.
As the New York Times reports:
Facebook has already been dealing with plenty of scrutiny. The company has been under fire from a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who amassed thousands of pages of internal research and has since distributed them to the news media, lawmakers and regulators. The documents revealed that Facebook knew of many harms that its services were causing.
While some Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages only affect certain geographic regions, the services are down worldwide today. This includes the United States, the UK, Brazil, Kuwait, and more.
Facebook has not yet publicly commented on the ongoing outages affecting all of its services
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