- Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been down for more than four hours.
- It marks the worst outage for the technology giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day, but the service only had 80 million users then.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been down for more than four hours Monday. All three platforms stopped working shortly before noon ET.
The websites and apps for all of the services were responding with server errors. Reports on DownDetector.com showed the outages appear to be widespread, but it’s unclear if it impacts all users or just some locations. It’s not currently known what’s causing the outage.
It marks the worst outage for the technology giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day, affecting about 80 million users. The platform currently boasts 3 billion users and the outage is already into its third hour.
In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook blamed a server configuration change for that outage.
Major websites can also sometimes go down if content delivery networks, or CDNs, go offline. That happened in June, when one such CDN, Fastly, was down due to technical issues. That caused major websites including Amazon, Reddit and The New York Times to go down.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” a spokesperson said. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outage comes one day after the whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and U.S. Congress revealed herself ahead of an interview with “60 Minutes.” The documents, first reported in a series of Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things.
As of 3 p.m. EST, shares of Facebook were down more than 5% amid a broader sell-off in tech stocks.
This news is developing. Please check back for updates.