Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger appear to be down right now

Facebook Windows
Facebook Windows (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger all seem to be having service issues right now.
  • This might be a problem with Facebook services in general.
  • There's no telling how long it will persist.

Update April 8, 2021 at 6:10 pm ET: Facebook and its associated services seem to be regaining functionality across the board.

On an otherwise uneventful Thursday, it seems Facebook and its associated services have decided to break. Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger are seeing massive spikes of outage reports on Down Detector.

At around 5:20 pm ET, reports of the three sites losing functionality began flooding in. As for other Facebook services such as WhatsApp, connections there seem to be hit or miss. Isolated reports are cropping up from individuals saying they can get back into Facebook and associated apps, but the issue seems to be persisting by and large.

This is the second time in just a few weeks that Facebook's core trio of social media heavy-hitters went down. If you mainly rely on Facebook's apps to keep yourself connected, consider heading over to Twitter for the time being, or check out the best WhatsApp alternatives in the event you need to have personal conversations and don't want to rely entirely on Facebook due to events like random outages.

This is a developing story, and we will update it as more information becomes available.

Robert Carnevale

Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He's a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author of Cold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.