Instagram, Facebook and Messenger down – live updates: Users unable to access apps amid major Thanksgiving outage
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Instagram, Facebook and Messenger have gone down in a major Thanksgiving outage.
Almost all of Facebook's products were hit by the problems, with the exception of WhatsApp, which appears to have successfully stayed online.
The problems were seen across the world, though did not appear to affect all users the same. Some said they were still able to see parts of each app, while others reported that the services appeared to be working as normal.
The outage recalls the major problems over summer, during which the entire Facebook suits of products went offline for almost a day.
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load
Facebook Twitter page and other profiles still silent
There's no post on the official Facebook page on Twitter, either. In the past the company has used that profile to give notifications about outages – and even explain them, in its own mysterious way. But its latest post was sent yesterday, and concerned buying things on Instagram.
Problems at Facebook not letting up
As this chart from Down Detector shows, there is no sense that the outage or reports of it are going away. There are a vast number of complaints, and they are not reducing:
Outage comes at perhaps worst possible time
As well as being Thanksgiving day – when presumably few Facebook engineers are at work, or at least planned to be – the outage has started very early in the West Coast. It's still 7.30 in the morning in Facebook's home of California.
(Though you would hope, of course, that it has engineers elsewhere, who don't have holidays and are on a different timezone..)
A long way to go to trouble any records
If this outage is going to try and hit some records, it's going to have to wait for a while. In March, when Facebook (and its other apps) were hit by a major outage, it took more than 24 hours for the company to announce the problem was fixed. So we've got 22 or so hours to go!
Did Facebook do another 'server configuration change'?
Here's what the company said on Twitter in March, after that major outage:
Instagram responds to outage
Instagram speaks! Here's the latest from its Twitter account:
Reaction to Thanksgiving outage continues
How people feel about the outage varies. But there's certainly a lot of feelings, which tend to either be joy at not being subjected to boring Thanksgiving posts, or upset about not having something to distract from the real world.
Outage shows no sign of abating
Reports of problems continue to grow over on Down Detector.
Instagram coming back?
While Facebook issues continue to grow, Instagram seems to be slowly coming back online.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments