Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp all go down in major global outage

Thousands of people have reported issues with the platforms

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have all gone down in a major outage. The three Facebook-owned apps all stopped functioning shortly before 5pm on Monday evening (October 4). Other apps that are part of the social media giant's family, such as Facebook Workplace, have also gone down. Visitors to Facebook have been met with an error page or a message saying their browser is not connected. Whilst users could still access WhatsApp and Instagram, new content was not being shown - including any messages sent or received. Twitter is still functioning normally so ironically, Facebook have had to tweet about the news of the outage, writing: "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." https://twitter.com/Facebook/status/1445061804636479493 The three major platforms have been affected because they all run on a shared infrastructure which means when Facebook has an outage it usually has a huge knock-on effect because impacts Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. In one reply to Facebook's tweet, it seems that the only place not to be impacted by the outage is Iran. https://twitter.com/BenjaminPetzuch/status/1445062244899991561 The company is usually cryptic about what causes any issues and does not tend to explain them after they are sorted. Meanwhile, the platform's Policy Communications Director, Andy Stone, tweeted: "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." https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1445058088436908045 More on this story as it develops. Related links:

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