Facebook is down and Instagram is struggling
Trying to load Facebook?
You might have to wait for awhile. The social network is down for many people and Instagram, also owned by Facebook, is behaving strangely as well. To complete the trifecta, Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp is also having issues.
“We’re 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,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an email.
At around 11 a.m. PT, the Facebook developers dashboard showed a "partial outage" for the past two hours, saying it was currently seeing "increased error rates." Facebook wrote it was "investigating" the issue.
A look at Downdetector (which is owned by the same parent company as Mashable) shows complaints ramping up about a Facebook outage around 9 a.m. PT on Wednesday. Instagram followed suit shortly thereafter.
The same server issues are apparently affecting WhatsApp as well.
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With all three apps not working, everyone headed to Twitter to complain.
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UPDATE: March 13, 2019, 12:20 p.m. PDT: Facebook issued a statement via Twitter regarding the outage, and denied that a DDoS attack was to blame.
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UPDATE: March 13, 2019, 3:48 p.m. PDT After about six hours, Instagram issued a statement about the outage, letting users know they were aware of the problem and looking into the cause.
UPDATE: March 14, 2019, 1:47 p.m. PDT A full day after the outage started, Facebook explained what happened and blamed a system problem.
In a statement, a spokesperson said, "Yesterday, we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues. As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services. We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone’s patience.”
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
