Facebook has resolved a major outage affecting Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and other Facebook services on Friday, according to a statement shared with The Telegraph’s Margi Murphy.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services,” Facebook said. “We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” However, Murphy notes that she isn’t seeing the blue checkmarks that indicate someone has read your message, which could indicate there may be some small issues hanging around.
Facebook on the outage: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Messages are going through for me on WhatsApp..but no blue ticks
— Margi Murphy (@MargiMurphy) March 19, 2021
Facebook Gaming also says it has restored service.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, hasn’t replied to request for comment from The Verge.
During the outage, at one point, more than 100,000 users reported issues with Instagram on DownDetector, more than 24,000 users reported issues with WhatsApp, and more than 5,000 users reported issues with Facebook Messenger.
When navigating to Instagram’s website during the outage, I saw a white page with the message “5xx Server Error.” I also redownloaded Instagram to my phone and tried to log in but hit an error there during the outage, too.
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As expected, the memes about the outage were strong on Twitter (which, fortunately, seemed to hang on):
Friday’s outage isn’t the only recent blip in Facebook’s services: Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs went down back in December. Facebook and Instagram also experienced big outages over Thanksgiving in 2019.
Update March 19th, 3:05PM ET: Added comment from Facebook shared with The Telegraph saying that the outage was fixed, and made additional updates to reflect that the services have been restored.
