Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp coming back online after six-hour outage

Facebook services are down for users around the world, but they seem to be coming back online.

Update, Oct 4 (18:45 ET): Facebook services recovering from outage

If you're having issues sending or receiving messages on WhatsApp, you're not the only one. The Facebook-owned messaging platform seems to be down, and it's not the only one; Instagram and Facebook are seeing outages as well, with users around the world unable to refresh their news feed or see messages.

I'm not able to send or receive messages in WhatsApp, my Instagram feed isn't loading, and I'm not able to access Messenger. This isn't the first time Facebook services went down in recent months, and at this moment, it's unclear what's causing the issue. From the error message, it looks like a configuration issue with DNS servers.

According to Downdetector, users from all over the world are having issues connecting to Facebook services, so it isn't an isolated incident. Ironically, Facebook's status page is also inaccessible, so whatever is going on, the issue is affecting all of the social networking site's servers. Even Oculus is affected as it uses the same servers as other Facebook services.

Facebook posted on Twitter that it is aware of the issue and that a fix is underway:

We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

- Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021

I've reached out to Facebook and will update this post once I hear back. The last time the site had a global outage, it was around a DNS configuration issue that prevented its services from being able to talk to Facebook's servers. It looks like that's once again the case, but once we hear back from Facebook around what's actually going on, we won't know for sure. What is clear at the moment is that the outage took out all of Facebook's servers.

Update, Oct 4 (18:45 ET) Facebook says its services are coming back online

After more than a few hours, Facebook appears to be making some recovery as the main app, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram start coming back online.

Facebook posted the update on their Twitter account, apologizing to users for the inconvenience:

To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.

- Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021

Fortunately, you should be able to start using the apps again, although they don't appear to be fully functioning just yet.