Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are Down Right Now

Facebook services appear to be down at 9pm on Monday, according to reports on outage tracker Down Detector. The tracker noted widespread outages including Twitter, Google, and Jio; but while we were able to access the other sites, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger were the only ones that were persistently unavailable when Gadgets 360 staff tried to access these apps. At this early point, it's unclear what is causing these issues, but it appears to be a global outage, as reports on Down Detector's US website are similar.

We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Judging by the reports on the site, the issue seems to have started only about half an hour ago, at 9pm; over a span of 10 minutes, there were over 18,000 reports about an outage of WhatsApp. In recent times, we've seen multiple outages like this due to CDN issues, with Akamai and Fastly being the two most recent incidents; most recently in July an outage took out a host of services, ranging from Zomato, to Disney+ Hotstar, PSN, Steam, Paytm and more. 

However, given that the problem seems most acute with Facebook services, it might be an issue that the social media giant is facing instead. It is being speculated that the issue was caused by a DNS problem. As The Verge noted, Dane Knecht, an SVP at Cloudflare, tweeted that Facebook DNS and other services are down.

All Facebook services are unavailable right now.

Facebook has not given any details about the outage at this point, but a Facebook executive did tweet acknowledging the issue, and say that it is looking into the matter.

As mentioned above, this is just the latest in a steady stream of Internet outages. On June 8 a huge chunk of the Internet was inaccessible with popular sites like Reddit, Twitch, and Amazon all affected. a major outage at Amazon impacted users around the world – not just for the Amazon e-commerce platform, but also for a huge number of sites and applications making use of its AWS platform. And in August 2020, there was a huge outage incident involving Google, which also made a huge impact.