WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook all went down in a major outage.

We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

— Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021

All three apps, owned and operated on the same infrastructure by Facebook, stopped functioning shortly before 11 pm. Other apps that belong to the same family, like Facebook Whatsapp, have also stopped working.

Visitors to Facebook saw an error page, or a message that the browser couldn’t connect. WhatsApp and Instagram continued to function, but they did not display any new content or messages that were sent or received during the outage.

Although Facebook outages are rare, they can have a huge impact on users. This is because three of the most popular apps in the world are affected.

It is not always clear about the cause of problems and doesn’t usually explain to them after they have been fixed. It suffered its worst outage in years in 2019 and claimed that the problem was caused by routine maintenance.

A leaked transcript was published in the Verge in 2019, . Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, stated that outages like these are “big deal”. People can turn to competitors when they have problems. Zuckerberg noted that it can take months to get trust back and get people on Facebook’s platforms again – if at all.