Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram suffer global outages

Millions of users on Monday reported that they were unable to access the services WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Social media users took to Twitter to report that they were unable to access the services of the aforementioned sites. WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage.

The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other related products, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace, have also stopped working.

At time of writing, it is unclear what has caused the issue although the company has suffered outages before.

In June and April this year, the social media giant’s platforms unexpectedly went down due to a “network configuration issue”.

Downdetector.com, a website that tracks issues related to traffic on major websites, also saw a spike in number of reports which confirmed that a large number of people are unable to access WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.  

Many people have reported that the WhatsApp is not working for them. The web.whatsapp.com is also displaying this error message – 5xx Server Error. Instagram is also showing the same – 5xx Server Error message – message. 

The Facebook website shows an error message “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

The WhatsApp messaging app is unable to send or receive messages while Instagram and Facebook’s messaging platforms are also facing an outage. 

The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues, and does not tend to explain them even after they are fixed. In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.

According to the Independent Newspaper of the UK, “ In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg noted that such outages are a “big deal”. Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, he said, and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all ” .

A company spokesperson said that it apologised for the problem but gave no indication of why the outage began or how long it might take to fix.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” spokesperson Andy Stone said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

The same statement was posted shortly after on the official Facebook Twitter page.

Instagram also shared a similar update.

“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them,” it wrote on its communications page. “Bear with us, we’re on it!”

And WhatsApp also updated users through its official Twitter account.

“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible,” it said.

This is the problem of shared resource or putting all your eggs in one basket. When something goes wrong, the entire empire goes down.