WHATSAPP, Facebook and Instagram have gone down for millions of users in a massive global outage.
Problems with the services, which are all owned by Facebook, began around 4:30pm BST (11:30am EST), according to online outage trackers.
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Hundreds of thousands of people have reported issues with the social networking apps on the website DownDetector.
Many are reporting that they are unable to access the smartphone apps and websites of the hugely popular services.
Those attempting to open the sites on desktop are reportingly being met with a black white page and a message that reads “500 server error”.
The iOS and Android versions of the Instagram and Facebook apps will open but will not load users’ feeds or show them new content.
WhatsApp messages are not reaching their recipients, with sent texts sitting with a clock icon next to them to indicate that they haven’t been dispatched.
The Sun has reached out to Facebook for comment.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp commonly experience small individual outages, but it’s rare for the apps to all go down at once.
Previous blackouts in March 2021 and July 2019 have knocked all of the company’s services offline for hours at a time.
On those occasions, Facebook blamed a technical fault on the downtime.
According to DownDetector, Monday’s outage is affecting users in the UK, US, Austrlia and countries across Europe, Asia and Africa.
Users shared their experiences of the outage on DownDetector, with one writing: “Can’t get on fb at all.”
Another said: “Facebook keeps crashing and saying check your Internet even though nothing is wrong with my internet.”
Over on Twitter, a concerned user wrote: “Anyone else noticing every Facebook-owned property (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) is returning a 500 server error?”
Others took the situation a little more lightly, with one person tweeting: “Well I guess I’ll be getting some actual work done since FB and IG are down!”
More to follow…
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