Here’s why WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook stopped working last night

Facebook and its services like WhatsApp and Instagram stopped working for many people last night and this is the second time it has happened in less than a month. While the services are back up, Facebook has explained why things crashed.

More than 112,000 users reported issues on the Facebook website, along with 101,000 Instagram and 526 WhatsApp users as of 6PM EST. (Pixabay)

For a second time in less than a month, all three Facebook platforms including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger went down for thousands of users globally last night. While services on all three platforms were restored shortly, there were plenty of complaints all over social media, particularly on Twitter.

According to a Reuters report, more than 112,000 users reported issues on the Facebook website, along with 101,000 Instagram and 526 WhatsApp users as of 6PM EST. Facebook subsequently acknowledged the issue and reported that the services were back up. Facebook took to Twitter to explain what went wrong.

Why was Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram down?

As the social media giant explained in its tweet, a configuration change had caused the services to be unavailable to certain users. This issue has since been investigated and resolved. The outage impacted Facebook users followed by Instagram and WhatsApp users and users were greeted with - “We're sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again.” - on Facebook and Instagram. The timeline on these platforms was also not loading for the users.

And we're back! Earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. Since then, we have quickly investigated and resolved the issue.

— Facebook (@Facebook) April 8, 2021

There is no information on exactly how many users were affected by the issue last evening, but it is evident that it was a sizable number globally. Websites like Downdetector track outages by putting together status reports from a bunch of sources including error reports submitted by users. Many users do not submit error reports and sites like Downdetector do not take those into account, thus it is possible that the number of users affected is much higher than what was reported.

This is the second time Facebook and its services have crashed in less than a month. A similar outage occurred on March 19 when all the sites went down for more than an hour.