Facebook down: Messenger and app not working in huge outage

Facebook has gone down in what appears to be a huge outage.

The problems took down Facebook Messenger as well as the main app and website. Other Meta services such as Instagram and WhatsApp appeared to stay largely online, despite using shared systems behind the scenes, though some products such as Instagram’s website also suffered from issues.

Users were automatically logged out and found themselves unable to log back in. Instead, they were shown an error message indicating that “an unexpected error occurred”.

The main Facebook website also showed a similar error. Visitors were told that “something went wrong” and that the company is “working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can”.

Meta does not operate an official status page for its consumer products. It does have one for its business tools, but at the time of publication it did not appear to have been updated to reflect the outage.

Downdetector, a major tracking website that collects information on outages, appeared to have broken around the same time as the Facebook outage, though it was not clear whether it was connected. Before it went offline, it showed a huge outage starting around 6.45am local pacific time, or 2.45pm in the UK, and problems right across the world with all of Facebook’s products.

- The Independent