Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down in global outage

The world’s biggest social media company was having trouble connecting people this morning after an outage across its three massive apps.

Facebook appears to have suffered a global outage that briefly took down access to its social media and messaging services on Saturday morning.

Complaints collated by DownDetector show a surge at around 4.30am Saturday morning (AEDT) with people complaining they couldn’t access Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

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Complaints collated by DownDetector surged into the hundreds at around 4.30am AEDT.

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At 5.30am (AEDT) a Facebook “team member” told a group of developers that the company were “aware of an outage affecting Facebook Platform Developer Products and are working to resolve this”.

As of around 6am Facebook was advising the problem had been resolved.

A few minutes earlier the Twitter account for WhatsApp had shared the news that it was back after “a long 45 minutes”.

Thanks for your patience, that was a long 45 minutes but we are back! #WhatsAppDown

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) March 19, 2021

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all the same company. Picture: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP

The temporary outage on Facebook and Instagram appears to have sent at least a few people over to the platform’s sort-of rival (but not really) Twitter, with many complaining about being unable to access the Facebook services.

#whatsappdown
Whatsapp, facebook and instagram users arriving at twitter just to check if it's down 😂#whatsappdown 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/FN27LU2M1o

— Om Ghorpade (@omghorpade99) March 19, 2021

When everyone is opening twitter to confirm the whatsapp/instagram/facebook down news...🤔🤔🤔

Twitter Right now?😉 pic.twitter.com/Wxc7l2e2Eu

— MaLik NaVeed (@iammaliknaveed) March 19, 2021

every time whatsapp, facebook and instagram servers are down pic.twitter.com/GoUO4pphYT

— 💎🔌 (@gemplug) March 19, 2021