Facebook and Instagram currently suffering worldwide outage

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There’s no need to panic, but nearly all of Facebook’s services are currently facing partial or complete outages, with thousands of users around the world affected, including some of us here at TechRadar.

Facebook had to take to Twitter to tell its users it is aware of the global outage and is working to restore functionality.

Anyone affected by Facebook’s outage is faced with an error message on the login page that reads, “Facebook is down for required maintenance right now but you should be able to get back on within a few minutes. In the meantime, read more about why you’re seeing this message. Thanks for your patience as we improve the site.”

Facebook Messenger, while working perfectly fine for some, is down for others. We checked a few accounts here at TechRadar and found a mixed bag – some were fully functional on both desktop and mobile, while others were either working on desktop only, and some on mobile only.

Instagram, too, is not loading for many users around the world, with notifications showing up stating “something went wrong” when trying to refresh the feed.

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Instagram on mobile | Image: TechRadar

The apps aren’t completely down for everyone, though. Some users can, in fact, open the apps but many are complaining that they are unable to post anything, or even like other people’s posts.

Although WhatsApp seems to be working for the most part, many users in India, Bangladesh, Paraguay and Argentina are unable to send photos via the app.

The Verge has reported that some users are unable to make purchases through the Oculus Store or log into multiplayer games purchased for the Oculus.

Not a DDoS attack, says Facebook

After acknowledging there is an issue, Facebook also made it clear, via Twitter of course, that the company was not facing a DDoS attack. A distributed denial-of-service attack happens when someone is trying to interrupt the regular flow of traffic flowing through a network. This can happen when infrastructure is flooded with a staggering amount of traffic that can bring the system down on its knees.

According to Downdetector – the website that shows realtime outages on different kinds of services around the world – the problem does seem widespread with most users facing complete shutdown of services. 

At one point, 47% of users were facing a total blackout, but at the time of writing that was down to 32%. Also at the time of writing, 34% of users were unable to log into Facebook services, while 33% were able to open Facebook but had no other functionality available to them.

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Outage at 11:48pm BST (Wed) / 6:48pm EST (Wed) / 9:48am AEDT (Thur) | Image: Downdetector

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