For users all throughout the world, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger appear to be unavailable.
The outage began about 5.30 p.m. GMT (1.30 p.m. EST), although it appears to be limited to particular app functionality. It comes only weeks after the company, which just changed its name to Meta, experienced a massive outage.
All three apps, as well as the Meta-owned WhatsApp, went offline for several hours.
DownDetector, a website health checker, received tens of thousands of reports from users who were unable to access, send, or receive direct messages on Instagram.
“Everything on Instagram and Facebook is working fine except their messaging services,” one user remarked, while others complained they couldn’t post on either platform.
Every day, more than 100 billion messages are transmitted across Facebook’s apps, so any interruption may have a significant impact on people’s ability to communicate with friends and family.
Facebook released an upgrade last year that allowed Messenger users to send messages to Instagram users without having to download the other app, and vice versa. While this may be more convenient for some, it also implies that any interruption affecting one messaging provider would almost certainly effect the other.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Messenger, Workplace Chat and Instagram DMs. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Meta said in a statement to The Independent.
Following the most recent disruption in early October, Facebook apologised to its billions of users and claimed that the outage was caused by “data centre configuration changes.”
Many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations were also impacted by the underlying cause of the outage, complicating our attempts to swiftly diagnose and repair the problem, the company said in a blog post.
