Facebook still down

As Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram go down in the latest global social media outage, here’s what you need to know

Numerous social media sites were hit by major outages  worldwide on Monday afternoon as users reported being unable to open facebook, its Messenger platform, WhatsApp and Instagram across desktop and mobile devices.

Users began to report issues with accessing  facebook and WhatsApp at just after 4.30pm, with social media site Instagram also plagued by connectivity issues and ‘couldn’t refresh feed’ messages.

Here’s what we know so far about the social media outage - and why Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp aren’t loading right now.

With more than two billion users worldwide, WhatsApp appeared to be offline this afternoon.

Users logging on to the app or trying to access its desktop platform have been met with a loading screen, continuous ‘connecting’ status bar at the top of their screen.

The clock displaying next to messages on WhatsApp was also reportedly seen by thousands of users, with the clock indicating that messages are still sending and awaiting a more stable connection to go through.

Users will typically only see the clock appear when having trouble with their own local connection, but thousands have been met with the clock icon and connectivity issues on the platform over the course of Monday evening.

WhatsApp took to Twitter to address the connectivity issues, writing at 5.16pm: "We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment.

"We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. 

"Thanks for your patience!”

Downdetector saw reports of issues in accessing Facebook spike at 39,059 at 4.41pm on Monday, with user reports of outages for WhatsApp spiking at 74,944 at 4.51pm.

Facebook responded to reports of an outage affecting its sites at 5.22pm on Monday (4 October).

"We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook wrote on its Twitter account.

"We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

The company has offered no further update since, with sites still down at the time of writing.

John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare, tweeted  to say that issues appear to be stemming from a configuration error which saw “a large number of changes” take place to Facebook’s border gateway protocol (BGP) – the underlying protocol which determines how traffic is physically routed and peered across the internet.

A number of Facebook’s Domain Name System (DNS) records were reportedly withdrawn from BGP global routing tables on Monday, leaving systems unable to find its domain names and information.

In other words, the issue is likely to be more closely tied to the underpinning organisational structures of the internet – and an example of what happens when configuration errors confound the usual ways in which information is shared and delivered across peered networks.

Booming social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook, the giant Big Tech company headed up by Mark Zuckerberg.

The instant image-based social media site, Instagram, was snapped up by Facebook in a $1 billion acquisition in 2012.

Facebook went on to purchase WhatsApp in February 2014 for a whopping $19 billion.

The Big Tech behemoth has been facing increased criticism recently, with The Wall Street Journal publishing a series of investigations into the company’s suppression of internal research which found that its sites like Instagram were causing considerable harm to teenagers.

One of the internal Facebook documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal in September disclosed that among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the issue to Instagram.

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