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Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp go down for many in brief, but widespread outage [Updated]

In an outage that’s affected many over the past 30 minutes or so, major products from Facebook including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and the giant social network have gone down.

Thousands of users have turned to DownDetector this evening to report outage with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. All of the products appear to have gone down at around 5:30 p.m. EDT, but possibly earlier for some.

The outage appears to be affecting all devices, including the web and mobile apps. Some direct links appear to be working in our brief testing, but navigating directly to the homepage breaks on Facebook. At this time, Facebook isn’t reporting any issues on its dashboard and has yet to acknowledge the issue publicly on alternate platforms such as Twitter. At the time of publication, nearly 150,000 people have reported issues with the social network on DownDetector with similar spikes in reports on the company’s other products, including Oculus, too.

Within an hour, the outage seemed to be fixed for the most part, with user reports on a downward trend at around 6:15 p.m. EDT.

Notably, this isn’t the first major outage from Facebook in recent memory. On March 19, a “technical issue” brought down these same Facebook products for several hours. Notably, during that outage, the number of users who reported problems on DownDetector was actually far fewer than those who have already reported problems in just the 30 or so minutes the outage has occurred today.

The cause for this evening’s outage is unclear, but we expect Facebook to comment on the situation relatively soon to give some insight as to what’s happening and when things might be fixed up.

Many users were greeted with messages like this when trying to access Facebook today

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Avatar for Ben Schoon Ben Schoon

Ben is a Senior Editor for 9to5Google.

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