Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for millions of users on Wednesday morning, and there is still no word on when they might be back. The issues seem to be especially bad for mobile users, and concentrated in the north-eastern United States, parts of the U.K. and Europe.
Reports of Facebook and Instagram issues began to appear at around 8:04 a.m. ET on Wednesday, ranging from bugs and glitches to full-blown outages. A live map of the issues is available on Down Detector, a site that tracks widespread internet bugs like this. It shows the majority of the reports coming from the Northeast, with scattered hotspots elswhere.
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Florida, Georgia and parts of South America are also reporting issues with the social media apps. So far, Facebook has not issued a statement on the problems, but as usual users rushed to Twitter to discuss the issues on its competition sites.
facebook trying to figure out why instagram doesn’t work for the 20th time this year pic.twitter.com/OEhbOXjIe4 #instagramdown
— go crazy go stupid (@BTSsupporterno1) July 3, 2019
“Twitter the only friend left by my side when Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp decided to leave me all at once,” one person mourned.
Users rallied under hashtags like “Instagram is down” or “Facebook is down,” joking that the crisis foretold some kind of apocalypse. Many also noted that this is not the company’s first outage of the year.
Instagram and Facebook had widespread issues just last month, and again back in April. There were similar incidents in March, and in September before that. Each time, users head straight to Twitter to check in on the outages, while jokes about social media addiction start to spread.
At this point #instagramdowm is noting new….y’all should be used to it by now. pic.twitter.com/gAZksdaBr6
— Tabssbby💋 (@afr0beautyC) July 3, 2019
Many people who spend more time on Twitter like to mock Facebook and Instagram users when they come rushing into unfamiliar territory, although in this case there was no cause for superiority. Starting in the mid-morning, there were a few reports of issues on Twitter as well, mostly having to do with the direct message function.
At the time of this writing there are 193 reports of Twitter issues on Down Detector, though they are already dropping. The majority of them are concentrated on the desktop site rather than the mobile app.
Meanwhile, thousands are still struggling with Facebook all around the world, and Instagram is even worse, with over 9,200 current issues. So far, none of the affected apps have made a public statement, or given users a hint about when they might be up and running again.
Check back for updates on the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp outages.
