If you were having difficulty sending a message on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger today, or had trouble logging into Instagram, you weren’t alone – all three Facebook services suffered widespread outage, with tens of thousands of reports in seemingly all. markets. Other services like Oculus may have been affected as well. However, things seem to be normalizing now around 2:30 pm ET.
Top to bottom: Status reports for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Whatsapp are nearing their peak in Downdetector.
Reports on the severity of the outage varied slightly. Some of us here at Android Police were able to connect to Facebook Messenger, and it may have been one of the first services to get back online. The appearance of error messages between applications also varied. On Instagram, the outage manifested as a ‘5xx Server Error’, while WhatsApp simply displayed the clock icon next to messages that weren’t being delivered.
On: Error messages on Instagram (left) and the clock indicator for messages not being delivered on WhatsApp (right). Below: Error de Facebook Messenger.
The symptoms of Facebook Messenger varied a bit more. Some customers saw the “Waiting for network” error, as shown above, but the messages themselves may have passed, although that was not true for everyone.
Are all Facebook servers down? I heard that WhatsApp doesn’t work either pic.twitter.com/3WNFUk0SeE
– Lucifer (@fuukaba) March 19, 2021
Facebook’s Oculus VR may have been affected by the outage as well, according to reports on places like Twitter, although Downdetector did not corroborate this. (Downdetector, in isolation, is not always a reliable source for outage reports, as customer complaints are often leaked to other services by mistake, and it has a history of getting false positives from social media.)
The Facebook developer status dashboard did not take note of the outage.
The Facebook platform status dashboard did not take note of the outage either as it occurred or later when services began to come back online.
The trouble 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, as of 2pm ET, service outages began to resolve for customers, and by 2:30 pm, most things were back online.
We have reached out to Facebook to learn more about the three service outages and a spokesperson provided us with the following statement:
Earlier today, a glitch caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone and we apologize for any inconvenience.
Last month, WhatsApp renewed its efforts to retain customers amid its unpopular privacy policy changes, releasing a “simplified” explanation for those adjustments, though that hasn’t stopped customers from switching to customer services en masse. competition like Signal and Telegram – the former even suffered its own outage due to a surge in demand.
The last time we learned when these three Facebook services suffered a major simultaneous outage was in 2019, although Facebook was affected at the time. At the time, the problem was attributed to a “server configuration change.” The company did not claim complete resolution of that outage for more than 24 hours.
Coming back online
Affected Facebook services appear to be working again, and reader reports indicate that Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger are back online.
A statement from a Facebook spokesperson was also later provided.
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