JOINTLY-owned media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have all been hit by an outage this evening across the world.
All three platforms are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web on desktop computers or smartphone apps and were off line for hours from around 5pm.
The Downdetector platform, which tracks outages, had logged nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and over 50,000 for Facebook.
Andy Stone, from Facebook’s communications department, tweeted: “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.”
For Instagram, a total of 30,473 reports have been recorded, with more than 50% showing issues with the app.
It said on Twitter: “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!”
Tens of thousands were still reporting issues on Downdetector beyond the peak at just before 5pm.
There was a similar issue with all three apps in April 2019, when they crashed for around two hours before returning to being fully functional.
At around 11pm facebook feeds started to come back online although attempts to post were met with an error message.
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.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021
