Facebook and its suite of social media platforms (Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp included) are experiencing technical issues in South Africa and other parts of the world,
Reports on Twitter (you know, the place you go when other social platforms are down) suggest that the outages began a few hours ago. According to Downdetector, a website that measures the active status of popular websites has received more than 7,000 issue reports since 3pm South African time.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We're sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #facebookdown
— Meta (@Meta) July 3, 2019
The good news is the platforms aren’t completely down. Each platform is just experiencing a few technical issues that include images not loading properly, and timelines not updating.
It looks like the outages may be connected to a recent outage at the US cybersecurity firm, Cloudflare. In the past week, many publishers experienced downtime, including BuzzFeed, Medium, Soundcloud and Canva.
Our suggestion? Don’t panic. Pick up a book or dust off the old Netflix account. Facebook may well be back up and running once South Africa wakes up tomorrow morning.