Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all appear to be down

Updated March 19, 2021 at 2:25 pm: Facebook apps and services appear to be working once more, and WhatsApp has noted the downtime is over. We'll continue to monitor their status and provide further updates if necessary. The original story follows below.

What you need to know

• Facebook apps and services appear to be down right now.
• People are reporting outages of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
• Outage reports began around 12 PM ET.

Several Facebook apps and services appear to be down right now. According to DownDetector, Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger are all down. Reports of outages started spiking around 12 PM ET.

Ironically, the outages of these popular services have pushed people to Twitter to find out more about them. At the moment, there don't seem to be any official details about the outages at this time.

If you're looking to stay in touch with your friends but mostly use services owned by Facebook, you may want to check out the best WhatsApp alternatives.

Our senior editor recently wrote about how Microsoft mishandling Skype means that most of the people leaving WhatsApp aren't looking at Skype as a viable alternative. Microsoft may want people to use Teams for everyday use, but our executive editor Daniel Rubino recently wrote about why that isn't happening.

While we wait for more details, please enjoy some of the funniest tweets we spot about the outage.

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