You might have run into trouble messaging someone on Facebook or Instagram this morning. A service outage took down Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs for many users, with new messages failing to send and old messages failing to load.
Facebook outage disrupted Messenger and Instagram DMs
Right after Facebook connected the two apps
Right after Facebook connected the two apps
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
is The Verge’s executive editor. He has covered tech, policy, and online creators for over a decade.
The outage appears to have started around 4:30AM ET and gotten worse (or, at least, more widely noticed) in the following hours. The website Downdetector, which monitors website outages, showed a spike in users reporting issues with these services that peaked around 8:30AM.
Facebook says the disruptions have since been resolved. “Earlier today, some people have experienced trouble sending or receiving messages on Messenger, Instagram or Workplace Chat. The issue has since been resolved and we apologize for any inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote in an email to The Verge.
Service outages happen every now and then, but the breadth of this latest disruption is in many ways Facebook’s own doing. The company has been integrating Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs. Now that they share infrastructure, it seems that an outage for one may mean an outage for the other, as well.
Update December 10th, 10AM ET: Facebook says the outage has now been resolved. This story has been updated to reflect that the outage has passed.
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