Facebook and its online platforms Instagram and Messenger are not working for thousands of users on Wednesday due to issues on the phone apps.
The outage is worldwide, causing problems for users in Mexico, Australia, and several European countries.
DownDetector, a website tracking social media outages, shows users in New York City, Los Angeles, California, and Phoenix, Arizona also facing issues with all three apps.
Facebook and the network of social media companies it owns had a huge outage less than a month ago in which all platforms suddenly went offline all over the world for seven hours.
The reason for the shutdown was not clear, but online tools that track Facebook suggest it was a problem with its Domain Name System, or the servers that help create a website’s IP addresses. Internet security experts suggest the shutdown was triggered by an internal error that left Facebook’s servers unable to send users to the right destination.
Facebook even had to dispatch a small team of employees to its Santa Clara data center in California to try to reset the company’s servers manually.
Facebook faced similar widespread shutdown problems with all of its websites and apps earlier in March and July. In 2019, it suffered a shutdown that lasted 24 hours. After that long shutdown in 2019, the tech giant only vaguely alluded to the problem as “a result of a server configuration change.”
Part of the reason for all of the apps often going down at the same time is likely attempts by Facebook over the past few years to integrate the technical ecosystem hosting all its platforms.
