Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are down – again

Facebook Messenger
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp all appear to be suffering an outage that is affecting both the US and UK. 

According to the outage tracking site DownDetector, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp services have all seen a huge spike in outage reports in the UK.

The number of reports submitted to DownDetector in the UK for Facebook Messenger peaked around 3:30PM EDT with 7,915 complaints in a roughly 15-minute window.

TechRadar has confirmed that Instagram in the US isn't loading, at least for some of our team members, and the US DownDetector page shows similar spikes in outage reports in the US as we're seeing in the UK.

Facebook Messenger service disruption reports peaked in the US around the same time as the UK, with 4,743 reports in a 15-minute window in the early afternoon EDT.

Australia also seems to have been hit by the same outage, but the number of reports aren't nearly as high as in the US and UK.

In all three regions, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram all appear to be bearing the brunt of the outage, with fewer reports of WhatsApp disruptions, though the trend lines are nearly identical, so it may be more an issue of fewer actual users on that platform than the much more widely used Facebook and Instagram services.

This story is developing...

John Loeffler
Components Editor

John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. 


Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.


You can find him online on Threads @johnloeffler.


Currently playing: Baldur's Gate 3 (just like everyone else).