If you were having trouble sending a message on Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger today, or if you had trouble logging into Instagram, you were not alone: all three Facebook services suffered a widespread outage, with tens of thousands of reports in apparently all markets. Other services like Oculus may also have been affected. However, things appear to be normalizing now at around 2:30 pm Eastern Time.
From top to bottom: Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp status reports near their peak in the Downdetector.
The severity reports of the outage varied slightly. Some of us here at Android Police managed to connect to Facebook Messenger, and it may have been one of the first services to go online again. The appearance of error messages between applications also varied. On Instagram, the outage manifested itself as a “5xx server error”, while WhatsApp simply showed the clock icon next to messages that were not being delivered.
Above: Error messages on Instagram (on the left) and the clock indicator for messages that are not being delivered on WhatsApp (on the right). Below: Facebook Messenger error.
The symptoms of Facebook Messenger varied slightly more. Some customers have seen the “Waiting for network” error, as shown above, but the messages themselves May passed, although this was not true for everyone.
All Facebook servers are turned off, I heard that WhatsApp is also not working pic.twitter.com/3WNFUk0SeE
– lucifer (@fuukaba) March 19, 2021
Facebook’s Oculus VR may also have been affected by the crash, according to reports in places like Twitter, although Downdetector has not corroborated this. (Downdetector alone is not always a reliable source for outage reports, as customer complaints often spill over to other services erroneously and have a history of getting false positives from social media.)
The Facebook developer status panel did not make any notes about the outage.
The Facebook platform status panel did not record the outage either while it was happening or later, when services started to go online again.
Problem reports started around 1:10 pm ET and came from all markets in North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. The problems did not appear to be regional. However, around 2:00 pm Eastern time, service interruptions began to be resolved for customers, and by 2:30 pm, most things were online again.
We contacted Facebook for more information about the three service interruptions and received the following statement from a spokesperson:
Earlier today, a technical problem caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We have solved this problem for everyone and apologize for any inconvenience.
Last month, WhatsApp renewed its efforts to retain customers amid unpopular changes in privacy policy, launching a “simplified” explanation for these adjustments, although this has not prevented customers from switching massively to competing services like Signal and Telegram – The former even suffered its own disruption due to an increase in demand.
The last time we heard of when all three of these Facebook services suffered a major simultaneous outage was in 2019, although Facebook itself was affected at that time. At that time, the problem was attributed to a “change in server configuration”. The company has not claimed full resolution for this outage for more than 24 hours.
Returning online
The affected Facebook services appear to be coming back, and reports from readers indicate that Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are all coming back online.
A statement by a Facebook spokesperson was also provided later.