Facebook and Instagram Are Down, Sending Users Flooding to Twitter for Complaints

Facebook and Instagram were reportedly down on Thursday at 6 p.m. ET, and users flooded Twitter to complain about it. According to Down Detector, there was recently a massive spike in reports of Facebook being inaccessible. The outlet also noted that Instagram, which Facebook owns, was also down, per users’ reports. Currently, there is no word on what might have caused the outage.

While many are frustrated by the situation, others have been making light of it by sharing jokes on Twitter. “Facebook is down. Please check in on your parents, who may be unable to survive for 15 minutes without the ability to confirm if your cousin is still goth,” quipped NBC reporter Ben Collins. “Facebook is down, so if you want information on how covid is a hoax or that masks don’t work, you’ll have to actually ring that weird cousin no one in the family talks to,” author Aaron Gillies joked.

When it comes to Instagram, users have been less humorous about the issue, with many sending their complaints directly to the company’s Twitter account. “I can’t upload any stories it just keeps saying posting,” one person stated. “Hasn’t been working since this morning,” another user commented. “Won’t refresh or anything.”

Some Twitter users have reported issues with WhatsApp as well, another app owned by Facebook. In 2019 it was announced that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had planned to integrate them. In a statement at the time — shared by the New York Times — Facebook stated that it wanted to “build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private.”

The company added, at the time, “We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks.” A previous outage of the social media sites had them down for hours. No other social media sites, such as Twitter, have reported outages currently.