Facebook down - live updates: Company explains outage as WhatsApp, Instagram and other apps come back online

Latest news as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are back up

Explained: Why Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are now back online after being down for more than six hours in a major outage.

The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm UK time on Monday.

Other related products, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace, also stopped working.

Facebook has now explained in a detailed blog post what caused the outage - and why it took so long to fix.

It comes as former Facebook product manager and data scientist Frances Haugen testifies before a Senate subcommittee about the company’s research into Instagram’s effect on the mental health of young users.

In June and April this year, the social media giant’s platforms unexpectedly went down due to a “network configuration issue”.

Read our live coverage of the outage below

Key points

• Facebook outages can hit other services
• A Facebook whistleblower is currently testifying in the US Senate
• The outage was caused by changes to Facebook’s routers, which also stopped the company’s communication efforts

[4 October 2021 17:36 · Andrew Griffin]

Instagram asks users to ‘bear with us'

The official “Instagram Comms” account has tweeted about the problems.

[4 October 2021 17:27 · Andrew Griffin]

Facebook outages can hit other services

Because Facebook provides services that are central to much of the internet – even sites that do not appear to have anything to do with it – outages like this can sometimes cause problems for other seemingly unrelated sites.

In July of last year, for instance, Spotify stopped seemed to stop working. But the culprit wasn’t actually Spotify itself but instead a Facebook piece of technology that was embedded within the app.

[4 October 2021 17:23 · Andrew Griffin]

Facebook acknowledges issues

Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook, has recognised the issue and says it’s being worked on:

[4 October 2021 17:20 · Andrew Griffin]

Hootsuite posts warning to users

Hootsuite, the popular social media management tool, has acknowledged that there are issues and says that it is working with the company.

“Facebook and Instagram are currently experiencing issues,” it wrote in an update posted seven minutes ago. “You may encounter issues performing actions for any Facebook or Instagram profile within Hootsuite.

“Our team is working with Facebook and Instagram to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We thank you in advance for your understanding and patience.”

[4 October 2021 17:12 · Andrew Griffin]

Why does Facebook keep going down?

This is a fascinating account, from 2019, of a discussion between Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook staff after a number of outages. It sheds light on why Facebook is so worried about outages, as well as why they kept happening then.

They’ve slowed down, somewhat, but it has had similar big outages to this in recent months.

You can read The Verge’s story here.

[4 October 2021 17:07 · Andrew Griffin]

Facebook’s ‘Status’ page is down too

Facebook also maintains its own “status” page to give updates on how it is performing. But that site is down too, presumably because the whole site is.

(You can find it here, though of course you won’t see anything.)

[4 October 2021 17:06 · Andrew Griffin]

No news from Facebook yet

Facebook does have ways of talking to the world: it has official accounts for itself, Instagram and WhatsApp on Twitter, for instance, which it has used for updates on outages in the past.

There’s nothing on any of them yet.

[4 October 2021 16:59 · Andrew Griffin]

Hello and welcome

... to The Independent’s live coverage of a major Facebook outage.