Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are down in a global outage

Facebook Inc’s suite of apps, including popular photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, were down for tens of thousands of users, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the services. However, the error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.

Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.

A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo

Meanwhile, the social-media giant’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 22,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 3,000 users.

WhatsApp was also trending on Twitter Inc, with more than 850,000 tweets.

WhatsApp app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment,” the messaging platform’s official Twitter handle said. https://twitter.com/WhatsApp/status/1445060216161116168.”We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”

Downdetector showed there were more than 20,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for a comment.

(Reporting by Eva Mathews and Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru; editing by Uttaresh.V)