Facebook family of apps (Instagram, WhatsApp) suffers the most severe outage in its history

March 14, 2019

Facebook and Instagram users around the globe have been facing issues posting content to those social media platforms Wednesday, Facebook confirmed to CNET. The company apparently has had issues since 11 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector.

CNET said some of its staff members saw an error message that read "something went wrong" when posting a status update. Facebook told CNET it was having a problem.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook said in an email statement. "We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

There is no immediate word on the cause of the outage. Facebook used its Twitter account to say a cyberattack was not to blame. It explained it was not due to a "distributed denial of service," or DDoS attack.

CNET reported users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging app and the Oculus virtual reality company were also experiencing issues on its platforms.

BBC News reports Facebook had a similar widespread disruption in 2008, when the platform had 150 million users. It now boasts some 2.3 billion monthly users today.

In November, Facebook experienced issues for about 40 minutes after a mishap caused by a test the company was running. That outage lasted about 40 minutes.