WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage. The three apps – which are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working shortly before 7pm. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
The problem might affect a larger number of users.
Messages on Instagram and WhatsApp would not send, and new content would not load. Facebook’s main webpage returned a message saying the site could not be reached.
Security experts tracking the situation said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
