Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Come Back Online After Massive Outage
The platforms were inactive for six hours.
Earlier this afternoon at around 12 p.m. ET, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced a global outage. This marks Facebook’s biggest outage since 2008 when the platform was down for around 24 hours with 80 million users at the time, as per CNBC.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook shared in a statement. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
According to The Verge, the outage occurred “as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens.” Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted that the company was “experiencing networking issues” and that teams were “working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.” Meanwhile, Instagram simply said that they were “having a little bit of a hard time.”
At the time of writing, Facebook is now back online, while Instagram and WhatsApp have been restored to select users.
