Users have been experiencing outages on Facebook and the other platforms owned by the company — Instagram and WhatsApp — on Wednesday, as reports of technical issues have spiked across the United States and in some areas of Europe.
The technical difficulties began on Wednesday morning as more than 7,000 reports were submitted by frustrated users experiencing problems on Facebook, according to Downdetector, a site that provides a real-time analysis of outages on popular websites. Many of the reports complained that images and videos were not uploading or displaying properly.
Downdetector’s outage map for Facebook depicts outages in the United States in the Northeastern region and on the West coast, as well as in Florida and Texas. The map also appears to show outages scattered across Europe.
Instagram’s outage map appears to show particularly the East and West coast of the United States being affected, with over 9,000 users reporting technical difficulties on Wednesday morning. WhatsApp, with just over 1,000 recent reports, depicts affected users in South America and Europe, but especially in Germany and Brazil.
Facebook took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to inform its users that the company is aware of the technical difficulties and is working on the issue.
Meanwhile, Facebook users also took to Twitter to comment on the outages they have been experiencing — which consisted mostly of jokes about how they had switched to Twitter — using the hashtags #FacebookDown, #InstagramDown, and #WhatsAppDown.
“Me turning my wifi on and off 25 times in a row and suddenly opens twitter and realized… ohh!” tweeted one user.
“instagram, facebook and whatsapp users on their way to twitter,” said another.
“Tried sending a picture on WhatsApp, didn’t work. Then went onto Facebook messenger, also didn’t work. Finally Instagram DM, again didn’t work. The problem when one company owns everything,” tweeted a third user.
Wednesday’s technical difficulties are just the latest in a series of outages experienced on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in recent months. In April, all three social media platforms were down across the United States and Europe.
In March, users on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were reporting issues, with Facebook — again — tweeting of its technical difficulties to its users.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.
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