Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all experienced outages on Friday morning, throwing the popular social media apps offline for, at minimum, thousands of users.
On Downdetector.com, a website dedicated to tracking outages, there was a spike in complaints for Facebook at around 10:30 a.m. PT, with about 6,000 outages reported on the site over the next half hour. Instagram received even more complaints, with the popular picture-and-video app getting nearly 20,000 complaints between 10:20 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. PT. WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app, had around 24,000 complaints during that same time frame as well.
A Facebook rep did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on the outages, their cause, and when impacted users can expect to have their service restored. The Twitter account for Facebook Gaming on Friday morning tweeted there “are a number of issues currently affecting Facebook products, including gaming streams,” and that “multiple teams” were working to solve the issue.
The outages didn’t appear to be constrained to a particular geographic location: users from Aruba, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Oregon all commented on Downdetector’s website, saying their Facebook accounts weren’t functioning. Overall, about 3.3 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s apps around the world.
As usual when something like this happens, plenty of users headed over to Twitter to joke about the apps going down. Here’s a look at a few of the jokes at Facebook’s expense:
https://twitter.com/gemplug/status/1372975483013435400?s=20
https://twitter.com/jimbo_world1/status/1372974887086792710?s=20
Everyone trying to fix Instagram by switching between Data and WIFI for 20 Minutes #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/GghMsnjeWs
— Fauzan (@FauzanSadiq11) March 19, 2021
https://twitter.com/UNITEDEXTRA_/status/1372973050380095491?s=20
Wall Street didn’t seem to mind Facebook’s problems, though, with the social network’s stock price up 4% on Friday to about $290 per share.
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