Update: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp all seem to be working again, but this is the second time the popular social media and messenger services were down in a month.
Couldn’t access your Facebook feed today? Instagram photos didn’t load? Whatsapp messages wouldn’t go through? You weren’t alone. All Facebook-owned apps were down for potentially billions of users today. We experienced an outage for roughly 20 minutes, according to our testing and the complaints of others – mostly via Twitter.
⚠️Anyone else? Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are down for me.I’ll continue to tweet about restocks from here while Twitter remains up. But I plan to hold a Q&A on Instagram Stories tonight (so many questions). https://t.co/GPPm6DUZStApril 8, 2021
“We’re sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again,” said the Instagram app whenever we tried to access any part of the app. We’re now able to refresh our feed of photos and videos, nor were we able to send messages.
WhatsApp was similar, with a ‘Connecting’ and circular icon near the top, and we saw the same sort of problems in the Facebook Messenger app. Messages didn’t go out to our contacts for about a half hour. Eventually out WhatsApp messages went through, but the app is still having trouble connecting.
Facebook has yet to comment on the issues, but there have been similar issues in the past that have seen all of these services suffer outages at the same time.
TechRadar has asked Facebook for a comment on what’s happening, but we’ve yet to hear back. However, without Facebook commenting officially, we haven’t gotten confirmation on why its services went down or how many of its billions of users were affected.
We’ll continue monitoring the four Facebook-owned services – which don’t appear to be down any longer – in case your messages stop working again.