Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp users were in a frenzy after many attempted to log in today only to find that the sites were down. The outage appeared to have affected users around the world, with thousands of reports within the first hour.
According to Down Detector, the outages appear to have started around 4:48 p.m. (ET). By around 7pm, most of the problems appeared to have been resolved. Users took to Twitter to express their grief about the issue, which seems to have crashed both the mobile application and the desktop versions of the Facebook-owned sites.
A live map shows Facebook outage hotspots across the United States, with the northeast hit particularly hard. Facebook also appears to be down for users in Europe. Parts of South America, the Philippines and India also seemed to have been hit.
Users reported having issues logging into the service, posting comments and viewing photos.
Facebook showed an error message for some users on its site that read: ‘Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue.
‘We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.’ WhatsApp users said they could neither send nor receive messages on the app. Many tried to restart their apps, or delete and re-download them, but continued to experience the same issues.
On Twitter, many users checked in to see if the problem was affecting others.
‘Facebook and Instagram are down, the one time of the year I actually get on Twitter…because I don’t know what else to do with my life,’ one user tweeted. Source