Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Were Briefly Down for Users Around the World

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger — all Facebook services were briefly down around the world. Many users had been posting on Twitter about not being able to log into any of the Facebook services, and Gadgets 360 staff also found that we can't send messages on WhatsApp, or open the other sites for almost an hour. According to website outage tracker Downdetector, the problems started to be noticed by users at around 10.30pm IST on Friday, March 19 — as of 11.30pm IST they started to be functional again.

Less than an hour later, there were already almost 40,000 reports on the tracker for WhatsApp. A similar trend can be seen for all other Facebook services including Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, apart from the main social network itself. The issue wasn't just limited to the websites either — the apps for these platforms were also not working

WhatsApp errors started at around 10.30pm and suddenly spiked, and so did other Facebook apps
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Downdetector

Since then, many people were tweeting about problems with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Looking at the map on Downdetector, it didn't appear to be a problem with any one region, but was impacting people around the world. 

At this moment, there are not many other details about why the service was down, but this is not the first time in recent months that Facebook has been down — just a few months ago, all Facebook services were down for several hours in December 2020.

Facebook's own downtime dashboard does not reflect any issues at the moment, but its 90 days history also marked some issues in January apart from the major outage in December.

Users around the world are making jokes, trying to guess what caused the outage, and just venting on Twitter, but at this point, it's not clear when the social network and its various services will be back. This highlights something else that's worth noting — as we've become more and more reliant on Facebook's services, particularly WhatsApp to drive not just updates and funny cat pictures, but build entire businesses and communities on, outages like these can actually be quite serious.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users coming to Twitter pic.twitter.com/k00iUUfZgs

— Turi???? (@_turi69) March 19, 2021

well damn, facebook, whatsapp and instagram down, @YourAnonCentral is that you?

— Jilly (@jillivanilli) March 19, 2021

Me just trying to exist while Insta, Facebook, and Whatsapp are down #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/7b7h6GX8RW

— Punyae Bhatia (@Punyae3671) March 19, 2021

Has the Redmi Note 10 Series raised the bar in the budget phone market in India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.