Outages hit Facebook’s apps including Instagram and WhatsApp | Innovation

If it didn’t already feel like the sky was falling at Facebook, it probably does now.

Facebook confirmed that its family of apps, which includes Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced outages over the course of several hours on Tuesday.

Facebook confirmed the issues on its Twitter account, saying the company was “working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was unclear what caused the outage.

A map from DownDetector.com, a website that tracks online service interruptions, showed a widespread outage in the United States, with users on the East Coast having the most difficulty accessing Facebook. The outage also hit London, according to the map, along with pockets in Asia, South America and the Middle East.

Small, short outages usually happen every so often to all of the social media giants. However, it’s rare for Facebook’s entire family of apps to be spotty at the same time.

The outage comes as Facebook’s stock price continues to slide. The company is on track to post a three-month losing streak, its worst since it went public in 2012.

Tuesday’s outage is the second in the month of November, with the social network having problems just more than a week ago. The company said that outage was due to a “routine test.”