Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in widespread lengthy outage
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all experiencing outages, preventing users from accessing the apps.
Figures suggest there has been a partial outage across its apps since 4pm GMT, making it one of the longest outages the company has suffered in the recent past. The issue is impacting all of Facebook's apps.
The outage includes Oculus, Facebook's virtual reality company and Workplace, its corporate comunications software. It has also blocked Login with Facebook, the system used to sign in to thousands of websites including Spotify and Tinder.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” the company posted on Twitter, adding that the outages were not due to a DSoS attack.
DSoS is short for distributed denial of service, a cyber attack by which multiple computers flood a website's servers in an attempt to take it offline.
We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
Facebook said it is working to fix the issue. It is not yet known what has caused the outages.
The website Downdetector.com has received over 10,000 outage reports which show outages across the North and South America, as well as Europe.
The hashtags #facebookdown and #instagramdown are both trending on Twitter as hundreds have taken to the site to complain they are unable to log into their accounts.
