Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger recovered from major outage

Facebook resolved a major outage affecting Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and other Facebook services on Friday, according to a statement shared with The telegraph Margi Murphy.

“Earlier today, a technical problem caused people to have difficulty accessing certain Facebook services”, Facebook said. “We have solved this problem for everyone and we apologize for the inconvenience caused.” However, Murphy notes that she doesn’t see the blue check marks indicating that someone has read your post, which could indicate there may be small issues.

Facebook games also said he restored the service.

Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, did not respond to request for comment from The edge.

During the outage, at one point, over 100,000 users reported issues with Instagram on DownDetector, over 24,000 users reported issues with WhatsApp, and over 5,000 users reported issues with Facebook Messenger.

While browsing the Instagram website during the outage, I saw a blank page with the message “Server Error 5xx”. I also downloaded Instagram to my phone again and tried to log in, but also encountered an error during the outage.

As expected, memes about the outage were strong on Twitter (which thankfully seemed to hang on):

Friday’s blackout isn’t the only recent problem in Facebook services: Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs declined in December. Facebook and Instagram also had big outages during Thanksgiving in 2019.

Updated March 19, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added a comment from Facebook shared with The Telegraph saying the outage has been fixed and made additional updates to indicate services have been restored.