KARACHI: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for thousands of users across the globe on Monday night, according to Downdetector that offers real-time status and outage information for all kinds of services.
The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working at 8:23pm (Pakistan Standard Time). Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
User reports indicate Facebook is having problems since 11:44 AM EDT. https://t.co/8wgYQLKxCu RT if you’re also having problems #Facebookdown
— Downdetector (@downdetector) October 4, 2021
Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work, but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.
WhatsApp had last went down in March and was restored hours later, however, the reason for the outage was not officially announced by the company. Photo-sharing app Instagram had also gone down earlier this month and was stored after hours.
Meanwhile, the portal showed there were more than 20,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram worldwide.
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”.
