Update March 14th, 12:51PM ET: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are now fully functional. Facebook blamed the outage on a “server configuration change.” The article below is unchanged from the last update on March 13th.
Facebook and Instagram appear to be partially down for some users around the world today. While you can open both platforms and some services appear to have been restored, users are reporting issues with sending messages on Messenger, posting to the feed on all Facebook products, and accessing other features on Facebook.com, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Even Facebook-owned Oculus VR is experiencing issues related to the outage.
Earlier in the day, WhatsApp appeared to be fine for many people, but users in Paraguay, India, Bangladesh, Argentina, and more note that they begun experiencing issues with sending messages as the afternoon went on. DownDetector indicates that those in Brazil were experiencing the most severe outages.
We tested multiple accounts at The Verge, and found that Messenger couldn’t load at all on desktop, although the mobile app was working. Instagram is markedly worse: for some users, posts aren’t loading, Instagram Stories are down, and direct messages and the button to post new content are also not working. Facebook’s ad section was not functioning either, and it led to an internal error when you tried to buy an ad.
About an hour after users first noted the outage, Facebook responded on Twitter. It also noted that “the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.”
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