Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp services have unexpectedly gone down.
Users are reporting issues in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Bangladesh, and more. There are also intermittent problems for users in the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to the website DownDetector, which tracks online outages, the issue began at 6:40pm EDT / 11:40pm GMT.
Over 40 per cent of reports on the DownDetector website state that there is a total blackout of the social media platform’s services. On Twitter, users report that they are having difficulties loading photos and posts.
There does not appear to be a specific cause for the problem yet. Facebook has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Independent.
Facebook’s official status page also does not indicate there is an issue, despite numerous reports from users. Insiders claim that Facebook is currently restoring operability.
The networking giant has experienced issues like this before in April this year, as well as in March.
Facebook has been working to integrate its various services, including the backend of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, in order to allow cross-platform messaging between the apps.
However, critics have highlighted that increased integration means outages are more dramatic – as well as making it harder for lawmakers to break up the platform, something they have proposed before.
The outage also follows a number of major websites including Reddit, Amazon, the UK government and many of the world’s biggest news organisations going dark due to a software bug from content delivery network company Fastly.
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