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Facebook has resolved a major outage affecting Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and other Facebook services on Friday, according to a statement shared with The Telegraph’s Margi Murphy.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services,” Facebook said. “We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” However, Murphy notes that she isn’t seeing the blue checkmarks that indicate someone has read your message, which could indicate there may be some small issues hanging around.
Facebook on the outage: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Messages are going through for me on WhatsApp..but no blue ticks
— Margi Murphy (@MargiMurphy) March 19, 2021
Facebook also shared the statement with The Verge.
Instagram confirmed on Twitter that the service is back:
Some people were having issues with their Instagram accounts earlier, but we're back now. The issue's been fixed and we're sorry for the trouble. #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/dd9mJPiqDz
— Instagram (@instagram) March 19, 2021
Facebook Gaming also says it has restored service.
We've restored service. If you continue to have issues going live, or see issues on a stream, please either contact support ( https://t.co/dj6GEjPbBp ) or report directly from the stream. Thanks for your patience! https://t.co/czPg4W5Zqu
— Facebook Gaming (@FacebookGaming) March 19, 2021
At one point during the outage, more than 100,000 users reported issues with Instagram on DownDetector, more than 24,000 users reported issues with WhatsApp, and more than 5,000 users reported issues with Facebook Messenger.
When navigating to Instagram’s website during the outage, I saw a white page with the message “5xx Server Error.” I also redownloaded Instagram to my phone and tried to log in but hit an error there during the outage, too.
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As expected, the memes about the outage were strong on Twitter (which, fortunately, seemed to hang on):
Everyone running to Twitter to confirm if Instagram and WhatsApp is down#instagramdown pic.twitter.com/hOEJdzuVww
— No Help (@parkthebus8989) March 19, 2021
Every person when Instagram and WhatsApp stops working:#instagramdown pic.twitter.com/v0fXtMx5EN
— Avinash Ki Hai Jasmin (@Avinashxtweets) March 19, 2021
this how people from whatsapp and instagram come to twitter when its down : pic.twitter.com/QCnuMxcpC1
— (@wabbigoatss_) March 19, 2021
Friday’s outage isn’t the only recent blip in Facebook’s services: Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs went down back in December. Facebook and Instagram also experienced big outages over Thanksgiving in 2019.
Update March 19th, 3:05PM ET: Added comment from Facebook shared with The Telegraph saying that the outage was fixed and made additional updates to reflect that the services have been restored.
Update March 19th, 3:12PM ET: Added tweet from Instagram.
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