Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp Outages Update

At 2:45pm UK time, Facebook and its chat service, Messenger, reportedly went down.

People who tried to log into the site were met with messages like “an unexpected error occured” or “something went wrong”, The Independent said.

Instagram and WhatsApp, other Meta services, may have been affected too.

Issues appear to have been worldwide.

“We’re aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services. We’re working on it,” Meta’s communications chief, Andy Stone, shared on X earlier.

He said this before many began to see improvements on Meta’s apps, like Facebook.

The Independent has said there are “anecdotal reports” of people being able to log back into their Facebook accounts as of 3:38pm UK time, though others are struggling.

Speaking of anecdotes, the HuffPost UK team has been able to log back into our account as of 3:46pm.

Outage reporting site Downdetector currently shows some Messenger outages, though this has decreased significantly since its 2:22pm UK spike.

Side note: Downdetector traffic was so high today that the detector itself seems to have gone down.

Downdetector shared higher numbers of reported outages as of the time of writing.

NordVPN reports that “Instagram is experiencing issues. A significant number of users report issues with the website, apps, and other services.”

The messaging app appeared to be working as normal, per Yahoo! Finance.

In short, we don’t know yet. HuffPost UK has reached out to Meta to ask which products were affected and why but did not recieve an immediate response.

However, we know that Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp share servers. That means that an issue with one of the service providers could spell disaster for all.

Meta previously had a seven-hour outage that happened because of one wrong command that broke the “backbone” of the company’s network.

The 2021 error affected “the network Facebook has built to connect all our computing facilities together, which consists of tens of thousands of miles of fibre-optic cables crossing the globe and linking all our data centres,” Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said at the time.

We are yet to learn the cause of 2026′s outages, however.