Global users are experiencing outages on Facebook, including all social networks the company owns, which include Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. When navigating to these websites, a server error will appear — Instagram shows a “5xx server error,” which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook’s servers. Users are also unable to send messages or load new content on the mobile apps for these platforms. Even Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality platform, and Workplace, its business communication tool, are down.
It appears that the outage is caused by a DNS (domain name server) fail — this is the naming structure that forms the web’s infrastructure. So, if you try to navigate to facebook.com right now, the internet won’t know where to find facebook.com.
The trillion dollar company, which boasts 2.9 billion monthly active users, has remained down for at least an three hours and counting. At the same time, Facebook stock has gone down about 5.5%.
Instagram.com is flashing a 5xx Server Error message, while the Facebook site merely tells us that something went wrong. The outage is thorough enough that it’s affecting Workplace from Facebook customers and, according to Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook’s internal sites.
There’s no word yet from Facebook about what may be causing the problem or when those sites, including Messenger and WhatsApp, will be operational again, but typically these issues are fixed within several hours.