Users in UK, US, Australia and other countries find services inaccessible as company apologises.
Facebook has admitted that its users are having “trouble accessing our apps” after its network of services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, were hit by an outage in several countries, including the UK and the US, affecting millions of people.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for large numbers of people at about 5pm UK time and were still down at 9.30pm, with the downdetector.com site citing reports of problems from millions of social media users around the world. A map on the site showed, for instance, reports of outages from cities across the US, UK and Australia.
In a blogpost, downdetector said the outage was global. “Facebook is currently experiencing a rarely seen global outage that is taking out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. No word yet from Facebook on what caused the outage, but as of 9.30am PDT [5.30pm BST], we’ve seen over 5.6 million reports about issues with the company’s services from around the world.”
Shares in Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, opened lower after Sunday’s TV interview with whistleblower Frances Haugen and slipped further to trade down 5.3% in afternoon trading on Monday. They were on track for their worst day in nearly a year, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday.
Haugen, a former Facebook employee, accused the company of putting profit over safety, after coming forward as the person who leaked a cache of internal documents that have placed the tech firm in its worst crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal
