Facebook and Instagram are down

The world’s largest social media platform, Facebook is down. Facebook-owned enterprise Instagram, which is the largest image-sharing platform of the world is down as well.

Several reports of the outage started pouring in around 6 PM PST. #Facebookdown and #Instagramdown are trending right now on Twitter as users take to the micro-blogging platform to express grief and anger over the Facebook family of applications crashing.
Some users have been quoted saying that both the apps are not opening as a whole while others have said that they are unable to use individual features like sending messages on Messenger and using Instagram’s DM feature. A significant lot of users have said that they can’t load Instagram pictures, videos, and stories etc.

An outage map from downdetector.com has shown that in Pakistan, the network is down primarily in Lahore. Additionally, parts of Peshawar and the surrounding areas seem to be affected as well.

The outage comes amidst an already deteriorating situation for the social media giant. The network faced similar issues last week when it went down in the US for more than half an hour and users were shown the following message:

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

Afterward, a Facebook representative clarified on the situation by saying, “Earlier today, a routine test caused users to have trouble accessing or posting to all Facebook services including WhatsApp and Instagram. We quickly investigated and restored access for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

However, Facebook has not given any clarification regarding the current outage and instead it has ironically tweeted about the outage!

All in all, people around the world are NOT happy with the outage. Some (rightly) angry users have been taking out their frustration on Twitter and the situation does not look pretty for Facebook at the moment.

When will Facebook be live again, what caused the issue, when will their QA teams work to avoid situations like these, all these questions are unanswerable right now; all we can do is wait and keep our fingers crossed. We’ll update this story as it unfolds.