Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are down for many users around the globe. Some users are saying Facebook is down completely for them, while others are experiencing problems with only certain features like posting photos. The issues seem to be affecting both the website and smartphone app. An outage map suggests the outage is concentrated in the U.S. and western Europe, although users in some other parts of the world are sending reports too.
Those who are reporting that WhatsApp is down are experiencing similar problems. Affected users say they’re having problems sending messages. Those who say Instagram is down report problems with photos not loading on the photo-sharing network.
No word yet from Facebook on what might be causing the outages on three of its platforms. The company has not posted anything about the problems on its Twitter account. As usual, Twitter is the place where Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users go to complain when any of the other three networks is down. In fact, the hashtags #facebookdown and #instagramdown were trending on Twitter alongside more general topics such as #WednesdayWisdom and #BoycottTrump4thOfJuly.
Even though Facebook keeps WhatsApp and Instagram mostly separate from its main network, it seems likely that they share some common infrastructure, which is why when one goes down, the others might too. In March, all three social networks went down for almost a full day in what was probably among the most widespread outages in the internet’s history. Company executives have already said they plan to tie the three services more closely together, although those efforts hit a snag earlier this year.
The fact that so many internet services share infrastructure is likely to become a bigger and bigger problem as time goes by. Last week a widespread internet outage impacted Verizon Wireless, Google, Amazon, Cloudflare, Reddit and other services. The reason for that outage was not immediately clear either.
