Another day, another service outage at social media giant Facebook and its subsidiary company Instagram. Yes, Facebook and Instagram have been hit by a worldwide service outage forcing both platforms to go offline.
According to the outage map displayed on DownDetecter, the scale of this outage can be seen affecting users in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Italy, Spain, Germany France, Poland, Ukraine, Norway, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the United States, the United Kingdom.
The outage seems to have begun at around 1 pm UK time after a message appeared on Facebook stating that Facebook is down and will be back soon. However, it did not explain why the service was down. On the other hand, Instagram’s app and website are also facing loading issues preventing users from posting their content.
“Facebook Will Be Back Soon Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few minutes. In the meantime, read more about why you’re seeing this message. Thanks for your patience as we improve the site,” the message said.
Here are some of the tweets and reactions from Facebook and Instagram users:
Holy mother of god. Facebook is down. I repeat Facebook is down (confirmed by several sources) #facebookisdown
— Ashleigh Pirie (@MissAshleighP) November 20, 2018
#Facebook et #instagram sont inaccessibles, en lisant certains tweets on a l’impression que le monde s’est arrêté !
— Chloé (@g_chlo) November 20, 2018
I don’t mean to alarm you but there’s a caravan of Facebook people headed towards the Twitter border#FacebookDown
— Jeff Dwoskin Has A Podcast (@bigmacher) November 20, 2018
Lots of people reporting Facebook and Instagram being down in UK and Europe right now#facebookdown #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/9UoWdd48Sk
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 20, 2018
It is unclear what’s exactly going on but we are keeping an eye on the situation and once there is an update from Facebook we will update our readers.
It’s noteworthy that lately, Facebook has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Last month, Facebook revealed that hackers had stolen access tokens of 50 million accounts while last week BBC reported that hackers were selling private messages of 81,000 Facebook users on an underground forum.
Update: Both Facebook and Instagram appear to be back online and available for users worldwide. However, there has been no word from Facebook about the outage. This article will be updated in case the company decides to address the issue
