Massive Global Outage Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp

Anyone who is currently trying to use WhatsApp must obviously expect problems in many places. Facebook and Instagram are also affected. According to reports, there is an outage that mainly affects the sending and receiving of WhatsApp messages.

Update 1:46 a.m.: As the WhatsApp team announced on Twitter, the instant messenger services are gradually coming back online and should therefore be available again for more and more users. The reasons will not be commented on until later. The same should also apply to Instagram and Facebook.

Update 10:20 p.m.: As Cloudflare manager Dane Knecht reports, there seems to be a problem with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) towards Facebook. That would also explain why even Instagram, which, unlike Whatsapp and Facebook, is hosted on Amazon’s AWS servers, is affected.

Update 6:20 p.m.: Currently nothing works on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. The Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp DNS servers are not responding, which suggests that it is a DNS configuration or server problem.

Shipping/receiving disturbed

If you are currently trying to log in, you will not have any problems. Problems only arise when new messages are sent and received – regardless of whether they are text, images, or speech. In our short test on different platforms we got various error messages, no new messages could be sent and WhatsApp stopped trying to connect to a server.

The disorder has only recently become acute. According to the portal in Germany, the first error messages from those affected reached them around 5.30 p.m. Since then, the extent of the disruptions has continued to increase, with reports going into the thousands. As far as is currently known, this is not a local problem but affects users worldwide. However, precise information is currently lacking. A similar incident with global repercussions last occurred in August last year. Back then, it had taken several hours before WhatsApp was working normally again and messages could be sent again.

Similar problems can be heard from Instagram and Facebook – but it doesn’t seem to be as massive a failure as WhatsApp. Instagram and Facebook are also currently completely “silent”. There is still no information about what could be the trigger. However, further service failures have been reported.