Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR are down globally

Facebook apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Oculus VR, are down in a massive global outage. It’s been more than two hours, and the websites, including the apps, are still down. It is not the first time the apps are down in a global outage; however, this is the most prolonged downtime we’ve seen for these social media networks.

The official Twitter handle of Instagram shared a message on Twitter saying,

Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown

via @InstagramComms / Twitter

While the Facebook app and Facebook Twitter account shared the same message saying,

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

via @Facebook / Twitter

Downdetector, a website that actively tracks downtime for popular websites by user reports, shows 74% problems with the Facebook website, 14% with the app, and 13% with the server as reported by users on the website.

According to the Down Detector, users started reporting about Facebook issues at 8:22 PM. It’s been more than two hours now, and the social network is still down globally by the writing of this news, with more than 50,000 user reports about Facebook on the Down Detector website.

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, retweeted a tweet that showed that Facebook’s domain is available for sale, saying, “how much?” The tweet exploded, and the joke suddenly got traction, which led to many people asking for making the tweet an NFT.

It’s still unclear whether it’s a malicious attack on the website or something that went wrong at their end. However, it is implausible that a hacking attempt or cyber attack was made since Facebook claims to have the most secure servers on earth.

Update: Added more information and tweets from the official apps.