Is Facebook down? Yes, and it has been for hours along with Instagram and WhatsApp

Published 1:37 pm Monday, October 4, 2021

Facebook’s website and app were down for several hours Monday, along with sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp.

The outages began at approximately 10:15 a.m. central time and continued through 1:30 p.m. central time, the website downdetector.com reported.

Whatever caused the sites to go down affected pretty much all of Facebook’s platforms and across the globe.

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Users reported experiencing problems with both the desktop version as well as the app. The website Downdetector.com reported that the outages began at approximately 10:15 a.m. central time Monday. Downdetector.com is a crowdsourced site that tracks online outages.

The outage was so pervasive that even Facebook’s own “status” page, which is intended to help users see when a particular function on the platform is not working was also down. Visit it here: https://status.fb.com/

Although the apps for the platforms would open, users could not send or receive new content or messages.

The outage couldn’t have come at a worse time for the social media giant.

On Sunday, a former Facebook manager outed herself as a whistleblower on the CBS show “60 Minutes” and said the company did not do enough to quell hate-filled rhetoric from the platform.

The cause of the outage — which appears to be the longest outage of Facebook in recent history, if not ever — was not immediately known.

And the company seemed incapable of using any of their own platforms to alert users, instead turning to Twitter:

Of course Twitter, unaffiliated with Facebook and known for snarky comments by its users wasted no time in chiming in:

Some users directed their frustration (and concern) directly at Facebook’s leaders: