Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp Down: Sites Have Outages

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced outages, as the sites were down for many users throughout a lot of the United States and Europe on the morning of April 14, 2019.

CBS Boston reported that people were having trouble loading all three of the sites in the morning hours. The hashtags #FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown took off on Twitter as people reported having problems with the sites.

People took to Twitter and Down Detector to share their frustrations with the pages. However, the Associated Press reported that most users’ sites were working again after a couple hours. Facebook owns both of the other apps. According to the AP, there are more than 1.5 billion users of Facebook throughout the world.

Here’s what you need to know:

The Facebook Outages Were Especially Bad in Europe & the Northeastern United States

Down Detector is a site that tracks social media pages going down. The map for the page mid-morning on April 14 showed that Facebook was still down in areas of the east coast and in Europe, especially.

The site says the “Facebook Down” problems started in earnest around 6:30 a.m. Half of people were reporting problems with their newsfeed. Others couldn’t log in and 23 percent had a “total blackout,” according to Down Detector.

France, England, and the northeastern United appeared to be especially affected. Some people reported they’d been having the issues for days.

People flooded Down Detector with comments about Facebook going down. “Yep, newsfeed still broken since yesterday. Funny, it worked for a few minutes here after fb came back up, but now back to no newsfeed,” wrote one man.

“Only getting a few items in news feed, then stops. Reload and get Welcome to Facebook. Been going on for 3 days now,” wrote another. “Fix the Facebook issues!!! I am too sick of Welcome to Facebook and only 1 or 2 posts then they disappear. This is B.S.,” wrote a woman.

Facebook had not yet responded to the reports… on Twitter, anyway (yes, Facebook is on Twitter).

The Instagram & WhatsApp Outages Followed a Similar Pattern

The Instagram outages showed a similar trend to Facebook. According to Down Detector, the site went down for people around 6:30 a.m. The common issues reported were with the newsfeed, logging in, and with the website overall.

The Down Detector live outages map showed the most problems with Instagram were occurring in Europe and, secondarily, on the eastern United States.

WhatsApp was also down, following a similar pattern. The Down Detector outage map for WhatsApp showed it was mostly down in Europe and the eastern United States.

People from countries all over the world – from Italy to Malaysia – wrote on the page about problems they were having with WhatsApp.