Facebook went down Wednesday, taking Instagram with it
Facebook went down for a large number of users Wednesday. Instagram, which is owned and operated by Facebook, was disrupted as well.
Many visitors of facebook.com were greeted by error pages:
Users of the social media platforms began reporting issues around 11:11 a.m. ET, and the outage got worse. The problems affected users on both desktop and mobile.
Multiple services, like Down Detector and Outage Report, had high numbers of users reporting the issues.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Outage Report's map highlighted the East and West coasts of the U.S. and Europe as the most affected areas of the outage.
Services tied to Facebook, like SocialFlow, reported issues with the platform's publishing API.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Some users could still access the Facebook News Feed during the outage, but many of those still had problems posting and sharing. Facebook's Platform Status page was reporting healthy operations for the first few hours of the outage. However, Facebook's developers site (also in the facebook.com domain) also went down and wasn't accessible for a period after 12 p.m. ET.
The page began to acknowledge "Degraded Performance" shortly after 1 p.m. ET.
A smaller number of users also experienced technical difficulties on Instagram. The problem wasn't as widespread as the Facebook outage, but Outage Report's numbers spiked briefly for IG, too.
Naturally, the internet turned to Twitter to vent its collective frustration at Facebook.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Others were relieved to be freed from their social media shackles.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The memes were strong.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
"We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable in an emailed statement. "We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
The Facebook Team posted an update on its developers page about the investigation into the buggy API performance at 12:18 p.m. EST, which it later updated to "Ongoing" shortly after 1 p.m.
UPDATE: Oct. 11, 2017, 2:36 p.m. EDT Facebook reps told us that most problems had been resolved at 2:35 p.m. ET and provided an updated statement:
"Earlier today, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Facebook services. We quickly investigated and started restoring access within about an hour, and we have nearly fixed the issue for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience."
Topics Facebook Social Media
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
