Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram return after mass outage - here's what caused them to go down

FACEBOOK has explained the reason behind a major outage which resulted in the social media platform as well as WhatsApp and Instagram being taken down for much of yesterday.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are currently down. Picture: Yui Mok/PA Archive/PA ImagesFacebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are currently down. Picture: Yui Mok/PA Archive/PA Images
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are currently down. Picture: Yui Mok/PA Archive/PA Images

All three of the apps first started to experience issues at around 4.40pm on Monday.

Remaining down until around 11pm before slowly returning overnight.

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Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by the same parent group Facebook, Inc.

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In a statement at around midnight, Facebook said: ‘To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry.

‘We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.’

Yesterday evening, visitors to Facebook were met with a ‘sorry, something is wrong’.

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Meanwhile on WhatsApp users were unable to send or receive messages.

Instagram displayed a 5xx service error on web browsers.

Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer has explained that the outage was caused by a ‘networking issue’.

He tweeted: ‘*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.’

Earlier Facebook apologised for the outage, a post of Twitter said: ‘We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.’

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Instagram also tweeted: ‘Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!’

WhatsApp added: ‘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.

‘Thanks for your patience!’

Other platforms such as Twitter remain unaffected by the outage.

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