Outages Hit Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had widespread outages Monday. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook tweeted at 12:22 p.m. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Instagram noted the platform is “having a little bit of a hard time right now.” WhatsApp said it was “working to get things back to normal.” The outages began around 11:45 a.m. EDT and continued for several hours. Network analytics company Kentik said “initial indications” suggest this came from a domain name system issue. Traffic to Facebook “virtually disappeared” at 11:39 a.m. Monday, said Kentik. AT&T, T-Mobile, Xfinity and Verizon also had spikes in service outages reported in the same time frame as the Facebook outage, per Downdetector data. “Facebook and Instagram had an outage today” and “some folks were trying to connect the dots,” emailed a Verizon spokesperson: “Our network is fully functioning.” The broader Facebook outage is affecting access to some apps, but T-Mobile’s network isn’t experiencing service issues, a spokesperson said.