Are Facebook and Instagram broken? What you need to know

Are Facebook and Instagram broken? What you need to know

Users are reporting issues with Meta social media apps.

James Martin/CNET

Users of some of the most popular social media apps reported widespread issues Friday morning. The issues included Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, all of which are owned by Meta.

Downdetector showed more than 80,000 reports of problems with Facebook around 10:15 a.m. ET Friday. (Downdetector and CNET are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.) Other high error rates have been seen with different Meta services, namely Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

CNET has contacted Meta for further details.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Facebook is back up and running for some users

By Dashia Milden

Facebook is back. For some of us, at least. We also see that Facebook’s Stories feature and Messenger work. NordVPN also updated its outage page to indicate that Facebook is now experiencing a partial outage. NordVPN’s 11 a.m. ET report also shows a drastic drop in outage reports (702 users).

Reports show users facing Instagram outage

By Dashia Milden

Down for Everyone or Just Me, another outage website, posted a banner reporting the Instagram outage.

“Yes, we are detecting issues with Instagram that started 1 hour ago,” the site says. When monitoring the website at 10 a.m., 10,183 users reported that Instagram was down. Some report receiving an error while others claim Instagram is inaccessible or experiencing connection or speed issues. You can report your Instagram outage on this page.

Downdetector’s numbers are back, and things could be improving

By Jon Reed

After some difficulties this morning, the Downdetector Facebook status page is back up and running well. And it shows that error reports quickly dropped from a peak of more than 132,000 at 9:50 a.m. ET to around 10,000 at 10:35 a.m. Facebook Messenger showed a similar trend, peaking at more than 16,000.

While some commenters said they were able to reconnect, others said they still couldn’t or had limited access.

Instagram reports peaked at around 9,500 at 9:54 a.m. and fell thereafter, but returned to 8,170 at 10:39 a.m.

WhatsApp showed an increase in problems, but that number was much lower – fewer than 200 at the 9:55 a.m. peak.

Facebook stories are not available on the mobile app for me

By Dashia Milden

Facebook Stories displays an error message on the mobile app.

Screenshot by Dashia Milden/CNET

Facebook seems to work fine on desktop for me, but my mobile app is definitely lagging behind. I opened the app to find a new post where my stories usually appear. The message asks me to try again, but doesn’t refresh when I do. Here’s what you might see on your app.

Outage numbers reported to NordVPN remain high as of 10:30 a.m. ET.

This is what I see

By Jon Reed

This is what happens when I try to log into Facebook.

Screenshot by Jon Reed/CNET

I’m apparently able to access Instagram, but trying to log into Facebook in my phone’s browser gave me an endless loading screen.

I was also able to see messages in Messenger, although they were slow to load.

We’ve seen a massive and sudden increase in outage reports across all platforms, where users can report that they’re experiencing issues. Traffic seems to be a problem even for these sites.

NordVPN shows thousands of users down

By Dashia Milden

VPN provider NordVPN allows you to report outages by clicking the Report button on its page. NordVPN reports that between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. ET, 27,649 users reported a Facebook outage. No users reported outages as of Friday morning before this.

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