A slew of Facebook-owned sites are experiencing a worldwide outage, leaving thousands of users unable to connect.
Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram have all been having issues since around noon (ET), in some cases resulting in a ‘total blackout.’
The three apps crashed primarily in major urban areas across the United States and Europe, along with parts of South America.
WhatsApp – also owned by Facebook – has been hit by spotty service issues as well, though it does not appear to have been hit as hard as the other apps.
Facebook has confirmed the platform-wide issue, but has not yet released a fix as of about two hours after the outage first struck.
Social media users flocked to Twitter to complain about the outage after finding that not only is Facebook down, but Instagram is too.
More than a third of Facebook users affected by the outage reported that they were experiencing a ‘total blackout.’
Others said they could not refresh the News Feed or log into their accounts. Similar problems cropped up on Instagram and Messenger at roughly the same time.
Instagram users have reported being unable to refresh the feed, log in, or access the desktop site.
On Messenger, many users have not been able to connect to the server at all and have reported that they’re not receiving messages.Many were quick to point out that they are frequently turning to Twitter to check if other websites are down, noting that the platform somehow is always ‘standing strong’ despite service issues elsewhere.
Others took the opportunity to joke about Facebook’s recent privacy scandals.
‘Pages won’t load. I’m sure they’re busy loading new algorithms to sell your data & spy on you better and more efficiently,’ one users tweeted.
