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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp just went offline for the second time this week

By
Jonathan Vanian
Jonathan Vanian
Down Arrow Button Icon
By
Jonathan Vanian
Jonathan Vanian
Down Arrow Button Icon
October 8, 2021, 4:13 PM ET

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went offline on Friday, marking their second major outage this week.

Facebook’s family of services became inaccessible to many users starting at around 2:30 p.m. ET on Friday, according to the Internet connectivity tracking service Downdetector, which relies on user-submitted reports of app and website outages. 

Both Facebook and Instagram confirmed the outages via Twitter. 

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said in a tweet. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.

— Meta (@Meta) October 8, 2021

We know some of you may be having some issues using Instagram right now (🥲). We’re so sorry and are working as quickly as possible to fix.

— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 8, 2021

At least anecdotally, Facebook’s latest outages don’t appear to be as severe as those earlier this week, which the company attributed to a configuration error. Those outages took down Facebook and its various apps for several hours, and Fortune estimated that the downtime cost the company about $100 million, based on an analysis of Facebook’s second-quarter earnings.

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About the Author
By Jonathan Vanian
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Jonathan Vanian is a former Fortune reporter. He covered business technology, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data privacy, and other topics.

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