It’s not your Chromebook: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all completely down

For a few seconds, I really thought my Chromebook was just having a fit. I simply wanted to send a WhatsApp message to my wife and the app refused to connect. At the same time, I was getting ready to share our latest review over on Facebook and I couldn’t get it to load. Like Google, I freely assume that Facebook is generally a stalwart URL that almost never goes down. At the same time, Gabriel was trying to look at a video on Instagram and it wouldn’t load either. I halted the restart on my Chromebook and headed to Down Detector to see what was up and to my surprise, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down.

This is unusual for Facebook. A full-blown outage is just odd and I honestly can’t remember the last time this happened. From what we can tell, the entire thing is busted as even Oculus has been taken down with this one. Right now, there’s no way to know exactly what’s going on, but it is big and it is global. Could a server farm have gone dark? Is this a targeted attack of some sort? Did a developer just put in one bad line of code?

For now, your guess is as good as ours, but it’s not your hardware to blame right now. We’ll keep an eye on it, but I’d guess things will be back up soon. There is a big story about Facebook and a whistleblower who is planning to testify to Congress that Facebook is aware of its tendency to spread hate and violence and they’ve knowingly worked to cover up that fact. Could this be a situation where Facebook is going to extremes to hide some stuff? I’d wager a planned outage to do this would happen overnight in the US, but maybe they are in a bit of a panic. We honestly have no clue.

Either way, we’ll keep an eye on it and continue doing what we normally do. Obviously, if you are looking for news from us or giveaway info in the next bit, Facebook and Instagram aren’t going to be much use to you. Tune in on Twitter for now and we’d expect Facebook’s properties to be back up soon.