WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook are currently down for many users in Nigeria and beyond.
The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working shortly before 5 pm. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
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.
The outage is affecting every Facebook-owned platform, according to data on Downdetector and Twitter. This includes Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. The outages appear to have started around 11:40 am ET/8:40 am PT and all of those services remain inaccessible.
Facebook, Instagram And WhatsApp Currently Down
The outages quickly started trending on Twitter as users flocked to the competing social network to check to see if other users were affected by the downtime. Humorously, the hashtag “#DeleteFacebook” is also trending on Twitter as the company battles continued pushback against the effects its platforms have on younger users.
As the New York Times reports that Facebook has already been dealing with plenty of scrutinies. The company has been under fire from a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who amassed thousands of pages of internal research and has since distributed them to the news media, lawmakers and regulators. The documents revealed that Facebook knew of many harms that its services were causing.
While some Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages only affect certain geographic regions, the services are down worldwide today. This includes the United States, the UK, Brazil, Kuwait, Nigeria and more.
The outage is also affecting platforms and services that use Facebook login. Niantic, creator of Pokémon GO, says that it is “looking into reports of errors associated with Facebook login, and will update here once we have more information.”
Facebook’s internal Workplace site and associated services for employees are also suffering from an outage today, according to Jane Manchun Wong.
Facebook has not yet publicly commented on the ongoing outages affecting all of its services. We’ll be sure to update this story as we learn more. The issue appears to be related to some sort of DNS problem affecting Facebook servers.
WhatsApp statement
In a statement, WhatsApp acknowledges that its service is down, “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible”.
Facebook statement
Facebook’s Andy Stone, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience”.
