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
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Your support makes all the difference.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
Instagram asks users to ‘bear with us'
The official “Instagram Comms” account has tweeted about the problems.
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.
Facebook acknowledges issues
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook, has recognised the issue and says it’s being worked on:
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.”
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.
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.)
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.
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