Social media down worldwide

Facebook has stopped working properly, at the same time as WhatsApp and users in Europe, the US, South America and Japan were particularly affected, with thousands of users across the globe running into problems, international media reported last night. ‘ Rather than a total or global outage, the Facebook issue appears to be specific to certain features. Users report that specific posts or photos don’t show, but that the page might load. Issues are being reported across the world, according to the tracking website Downdetector.

The problems come at the same time as a similar issue on WhatsApp. There, files appear to be running into problems sending – meaning that photos, videos and voice messages won’t show up properly. And users also report that Instagram has stopped working, with photos also failing to load on that site. Facebook’s “Platform Status” page, which is intended to track problems with the site, shows a message indicating that the service “is healthy.” But that site can be slow to reflect problems, especially when they are less widespread. Last time all three of Facebook’s major services broke, the outage lasted for many hours. It later blamed that problem on a server issue that had a knock-on effect on Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook, since the three use shared infrastructure.

“As a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” Facebook posted on Twitter after that previous outage was fixed.