Happy Thanksgiving! Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger all appear to be sleeping in on this most festive of holidays, as reports of a full-on outage are spreading across the internet. The trusty website Downdetector reveals that problems began shortly before 9 a.m. EST, and at the moment the outage only seems to be affecting Facebook’s own network of sites and apps.
None of the Facebook social accounts on Twitter or elsewhere have noted the outage or offered a timeline for a return of service. This doesn’t appear to be one of those special cases where half the internet goes down at once, and it’s clear at this point that something is affecting Facebook’s services alone.
Users are reporting that pages fail to load, and in our own testing it seems that Messenger responds to a page refresh but won’t load any messages. Facebook loads the main home page, but no posts, stories, or even quick links show up. The network is well and truly dead, at least for the time being.
Perhaps this is Facebook’s subtle attempt at getting us all to spend a bit more time with our loved ones on Thanksgiving, rather than burying our noses in our phones around the dinner table? Nah, that’s probably not it. It’s far more likely that the social network is dealing with a pre-feast hiccup that will be resolved in short order.
In the meantime, however, why not throw that turkey on the smoker, kick back, and enjoy some football? That’s what Thanksgiving is really meant to be about anyway, right? Happy holidays!
