WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook all went down due to a major outage.
The three apps - which are all owned by Facebook and run on a common infrastructure - all worked completely shortly before 5 p.m. Other products belonging to the same app family, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work but did not show any new content, including any messages sent or received during the issues.
Facebook outages are relatively rare, but they usually have a big impact, not least because they affect three of the largest apps in the world.
The company is often cryptic about the causes of problems and is not inclined to explain them after they are fixed. In 2019, for example, it had the largest downtime in years - and only stated that it had "triggered a problem" with "routine maintenance work".
In a leaked transcript posted in The Verge in 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg states that such outages are a "big deal". Problems can often lead people to take advantage of competitors instead, and it can take "months" to regain trust and get people back to Facebook's platforms - if they come back at all.
