Hours-Long Outages Affecting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Users Largely Resolved

MENLO PARK (CBS SF) – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users reported issues on all three services Wednesday morning that continued for hours before being mostly resolved in the late afternoon.

According to DownDetector.com, which tracks website issues, the problems started around 5 a.m. Pacific Time and appeared to impact users across the globe, particularly in the United States and in Europe.

Menlo Park-based Facebook, which owns all the impacted social media platforms, posted a message on competing social media platform Twitter about the issues.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” Facebook tweeted.

Instagram posted a similar tweet on its Twitter account.

Twitter also became the space where users and even prominent accounts posted their complaints and jokes about the outages.

While many users were still reporting problems, DownDetector.com indicted that the widespread impact of the issues for all three apps were drastically reduced by about 4 p.m. PST. Facebook users were reporting that uploaded images were visible again, though there were continued reports of messaging and image problems with Whatsapp and Instagram.

Hashtags and hashtag pages were still not functioning as of 5 p.m., according to posts by some users.

Instagram indicated on Twitter that the main problem was resolved at 4:45 p.m. PST.

Facebook tweeted an update shortly after 5 p.m. PST.

Back in March, Facebook experienced the biggest outage in its history, which also impacted millions of users worldwide. In that outage, the social media giant said it was due to a “server configuration change” and not a cyber attack.