Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Face Outages

Topline

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp grappled with outages Thursday evening that made the three social media and messaging platforms unreachable for many users for about an hour.

The Facebook “like” sign is seen at the company’s corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

AFP via Getty Images Key Facts

Reports of outages on Facebook and its subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp, spiked at about 5:15 p.m. EDT and largely subsided about an hour later, according to tracking service DownDetector.

Facebook’s developer dashboard showed error reports spiking at around 6 p.m. before returning to normal levels by 7.

During the outage, visitors to the three sites were greeted with error messages, though their mobile apps are still accessible for some users.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Big Number

2.8 billion. That’s how many users logged onto Facebook at least once a month as of December, according to the company’s 2020 earnings report.

Key Background

This is Facebook’s second widespread outage in three weeks. Last month, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp users were unable to access their accounts for about an hour due to what the company described as a “technical issue.” These errors tend to be fairly short-lived, though the company suffered a 12-hour outage about two years ago, one of the worst in its history.

Tangent

Other tech companies have also grappled with periodic outages in recent months. Google-owned services like Gmail and YouTube were disabled worldwide in December, and a November outage at Amazon Web Services shuttered scores of websites that rely on the cloud service.