If you were up in the small hours this morning, you may have noticed that messaging on Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger — as well as other Facebook services — were down. The outage also seems to have affected Instagram, all three outages were widespread. Downdetector shows huge spikes in complaints of service outages for all three services.
While the outage was relatively brief, for services that operate on the scale that these three do: The user impact is massive, so fair to expect an explanation. At the time of publishing this article, all three have acknowledged the outage but not yet explained what happened. Ironically, the acknowledgement came on Twitter which saw #Whatsappdown trending, a thread well worth checking out for some excellent memes!
Thanks for your patience, that was a long 45 minutes but we are back! #WhatsAppDown
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) March 19, 2021
Some people were having issues with their Instagram accounts earlier, but we're back now. The issue's been fixed and we're sorry for the trouble. #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/dd9mJPiqDz
— Instagram (@instagram) March 19, 2021
We've restored service. If you continue to have issues going live, or see issues on a stream, please either contact support ( https://t.co/dj6GEjPbBp ) or report directly from the stream. Thanks for your patience! https://t.co/czPg4W5Zqu
— Facebook Gaming (@FacebookGaming) March 19, 2021
All services have been restored to full strength with users happily messaging and scrolling. At peak, over 100,000 users reported issued with Instagram, 25,000 reporting issues with Whatsapp and 5,000 on Facebook Messenger, were you affected by the messaging outage?
