WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, and Facebook Messenger, all owned by Facebook Inc, have gone offline in major parts of the world as they share infrastructure.
Users in East Africa, reported the outage around 6:30PM EAT as their WhatsApp grew unresponsive while Facebook and Instagram reported an error page or a message that their browser could not connect.
These is not the first time the apps have gone offline globally, in March this year, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger went down for millions of users across the world making it hard for users to send or receive messages on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
The Facebook-owned platforms which are highly integrated have become frequent victims of bigger outages than necessary and have also grown to serve more than 6 billion users. Facebook Workplace is also not working.
After the March outage, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down again in April 2021 for thousands of users across the globe. The apps failed to load and the outage went on for over 30 minutes in various countries.
In a statement, WhatsApp acknowledges that its service is down: We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”
Facebook also issued a similar comment.
We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 4, 2021
Thanks for your patience!
Facebook internal memo: “We are receiving reports that several FB services are down (Internal Tools, Workchat, Workplace, Workplace Rooms, FB, IG, WhatsApp, etc.). This appears to be a DNS issue that is impacting both internal and external access to our tools and apps”
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) October 4, 2021