Facebook has had problems loading images, videos, and other data across its apps today, leaving some people unable to load photos in the Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, or send messages in WhatsApp. Facebook says it is aware of the issues and “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
The issues started around 12noon GMT and now appear to be clearing up, according to DownDetector, which monitors website and app issues.
The errors aren’t affecting all images; many pictures on Facebook and Instagram still load, but others are appearing blank. DownDetector has also received reports of people being unable to load messages in Facebook Messenger.
Apps and websites are always going to experience occasional disruptions due to the complexity of services they’re offering.
But even when they’re brief, they can become a real problem due to the huge number of users many of these services have.
A Facebook outage affects a suite of popular apps, and those apps collectively have billions of users who rely on them. That’s a big deal when those services have become critical for business and communications, and every hour they’re offline or acting strange can mean real inconveniences or lost money.
WhatsApp also appears to have stopped working, with users unable to send some messages.
While text appears to work, photos, videos and voice messages will not send through, according to various reports.
Instead, users just see a message reading “download failed” and the content will not arrive.
The same error message advises users to ask for the picture to be sent over again. But doing so does not seem to work.
Unusually, a preview of the picture does appear to be able to get through. It means that recipients can see a version of the pictures that are being sent – but it is fuzzy and the details cannot be seen.
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