UPDATE: The services have been restored.
Social media users are facing problems with the Facebook’s trio of social networks. Complaints about problems with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are piling up elsewhere. (And some might ask what else Twitter is good for except complaining about the other three social networks).
Facebook down
The symptoms of the outages at each social network are a bit different. When I tried to log into Facebook on my laptop, I received this error message:
Others are seeing a red box which states that Facebook is down for “required maintenance” but will be back up “within a few minutes” or “a few hours.” The exact timeline varies from one account to the other.
A spokesperson for the social media giant is sending the same statement to all media outlets: “We are aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
Facebook’s developers’ status dashboard states that the social network has been having a “partial outage” for the last three hours. The dashboard also states that the social network is “experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly.” The company also said it is investigating the issue.
Instagram is down too
It appears like similar problems could be causing Facebook’s photo-sharing social network Instagram to be down too. Many users who try to log into Instagram receive this error message: “Error. We’re sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again.”
Others seem to be able to log into the social network, but their feeds won’t load.
WhatsApp users can’t send photos
While the problems at the other two social networks are rather similar, WhatsApp users are expecting a slightly different set of issues. Users are reporting that they can’t send photos and other media, so it sounds like the messaging service itself may be somewhat functional.
It’s unclear what’s causing the outages at all three social networks, but Facebook is emphasizing (via Twitter, ironically, since most can’t log into FB) that a DDoS attack is not to blame:
We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
The social network probably wants to defend against any suggestions that users’ private data may be compromised again.