Facebook, Instagram messaging features suffer outage

An outage affecting access to the direct messaging features of Facebook and Instagram for several hours on Wednesday appears close to being resolved.

Earlier on Wednesday, both Facebook’s Messenger app and Instagram’s PR team took to Twitter to report that they were aware that people were having trouble accessing their direct message features.

“No, your wifi isn’t out. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #messengerdown,” Messenger tweeted.

No, your wifi isn’t out. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #messengerdown

— Messenger (@messenger) November 3, 2021

“We’re aware some of you are having trouble accessing our messaging apps at the moment. We’re working to fix things as quickly as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience, and hang tight! #instagramdown,” Instagram’s PR team tweeted.

We’re aware some of you are having trouble accessing our messaging apps at the moment. We’re working to fix things as quickly as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience, and hang tight! #instagramdown

— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) November 3, 2021

According to Downdetector, which tracks outages on different platforms, the outages for Facebook Messenger and Instagram both happened around 2 p.m. 

Data as of Wednesday evening around 6 p.m. indicated that the number of outages reported for Instagram and Facebook Messenger had drastically reduced, with possibly a small number still reporting the issue.

A spokeswoman for Meta, was is Facebook’s new corporate renaming, confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the tweets were authentic, and told the newspaper that the issue was due to an outage, though it is unclear what prompted it.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the issue was resolved on Wednesday evening. 

“Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble accessing Workplace Chat, Instagram DMs and Messenger. We fixed the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted. We know people and businesses depend on our services around the world and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused,” the spokesperson said.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Messenger, Workplace Chat and Instagram DMs. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience,” the Meta spokeswoman told the Journal.

Earlier this month, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced an outage on their platforms. A “5xx Server Error” could be seen on Instagram while Facebook displayed a “can’t be reached” message. 

Updated at 9:55 p.m.