A trio of Meta’s popular apps are down, leaving thousands of users worldwide without service.
Facebook, Instagram and Messenger started experiencing issues around 1:45pm ET on Wednesday.
All issues stem from the apps, except for those hitting Messenger – users say the messaging service is not working on desktop.
DownDetector, an online site that shows such outages, shows users in New York City are having problems with all three apps, along with those in Los Angeles, California and Phoenix, Arizona.
A trio of Meta’s popular apps are down, leaving thousands of users worldwide without service. The Facebook, Instagram and Messenger apps started experiencing issues around 1:45pm ET on Wednesday
The outage is worldwide, impacting several countries including Mexico, Australia and many in Europe.
However, Instagram and Facebook users can bypass the outage by using the platform’s online site – Messenger is down for both the app and desktop.
Instagram appears to have the most issue reports on DownDetector, followed by Facebook and then Messenger.
It is not clear why the services are down and when they will be up and running.
Instagram (pictured is the outage map) appears to have the most issue reports on DownDetector, which is down in major US cities like New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco
The outage is worldwide, impacting several countries including Mexico, Australia and many in Europe. Users have flocked to Twitter to share their frustrations, and some humor, over Instagram being down
This is the second time Facebook and Instagram have crashed in less than a month – the last was on October 4.
However, the previous outage lasted for seven hours and was due to issues with its Domain Name System (DNS).
Facebook does not use CloudFare but it runs one of the world’s largest DNS resolvers. When sites go down because of failures in DNS systems, CloudFare tries to repair them.
Usman Muzaffar, SVP of engineering at CloudFare, explained to DailyMail.com: ‘Humans access information online through domain names, like facebook.com and DNS converts it into numbers, called an IP address, computers use.
This is the second time Facebook and Instagram have crashed in less than a month – the last was on October 4
Messenger (pictured is the outage map) users say the messaging service is not working on desktop.
‘From what we understand of the actual issue —it is a globalized BGP configuration issue. In our experience, these usually are mistakes, not attacks.
‘Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol for the Internet. Much like the post office processing mail, BGP picks the most efficient routes for delivering Internet traffic.
‘Today, the directions for how to get to Facebook’s DNS server’s addresses weren’t available (and seem to still be unavailable).
‘Without being able to contact the DNS servers, visitors trying to reach a Facebook property, like facebook.com, will not get an answer and so the page won’t load.’
Facebook’s spokesman, Andy Stone, said: ‘We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.
Last months outage was so intense, even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged it on Facebook
‘We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.’
Initially, there were reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were all down too – however those reports stemmed from people being unable to access Facebook-run apps on their mobile devices.
Kevin King, Director of Communications at Verizon, said there was no outage with the network but that it appeared as though some users were having difficulty accessing certain apps or sites on their Verizon devices.
‘There is a known outage affecting some social media platforms, and that may cause some customers to believe they are having a problem with network connectivity. Our network is operating normally,’ a spokesman for AT&T said.
After hours of the shutdown, Technicians attempted a ‘manual reset’ of its servers on that resolved the issues.
