

Facebook's communications executive Andy Stone tweeted this afternoon to say the social media giant is aware of the current issues and is "working to get things back to normal."

The company has not commented officially on the reason for the outage, but it was thought to be a DNS issue. WhatsApp Web, the desktop version of the messaging app, showed a 'Computer not connected' message. Users attempting to access Facebook were being shown a message saying the site 'can’t be reached', while sister site Instagram was displaying a '5xx Server Error.' The mobile apps for the platforms were also down and failing to load new content. Messenger and Instagram, which are also owned by Facebook, are also down. Tens of thousands of WhatsApp users reported issues using the global instant messaging service while Mark Zuckerberg's social giant Facebook has also been struggling, with tens of thousands of users also reporting issues there. Soon after the first report came through, the hashtag #facebookdown was trending on Twitter, with users worldwide reporting issues connecting. Facebook and Instagram were reported to have partially come back online just before 11pm, while some users were still reporting WhatsApp as offline.Īccording to DownDetector, the issues started at around 16.44 BST (11.44 ET), and are affecting users globally. Facebook is starting to come back online gradually after crashing for nearly seven hours today.įacebook, WhatsApp and Instagram crashed earlier today for desktop, mobile phone and app users worldwide.
