How many people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp?
More than 3.5 billion people worldwide use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp – all of which were inaccessible for over five hours on Monday, Oct. 4, 2021, during the 2021 Facebook Outage. Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, leading to users not logging in to other websites or signing in to their smart-TVs.
What caused the 2021 Facebook outage?
Facebook said the 2021 outage was caused by changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers, “bringing our services to a halt.”
When was Facebook’s previous outage?
Facebook’s last significant outage was in 2019 when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours.
Sources on the 2021 Facebook Outage
- Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Were Down: Here’s What to Know – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
- WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram go down (CNN)
- Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage (apnews.com)
- Facebook blames “faulty configuration change” for nearly six-hour outage (Reuters)
- Global outage as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go offline (BBC News – YouTube)
- Nationwide outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (ABC News – YouTube)
- Facebook outage: How did it happen? (Sky News – YouTube)