Michael Hernandez
March 19, 2021•Update: March 20, 2021
WASHINGTON
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have gone back online after seemingly crashing around the world Friday.
The outages of Facebook's premier platforms affected many users worldwide with users of the services, including Facebook Messenger, recording tens or hundreds of thousands of problems on the DownDetector website, which tracks connection problems.
The problems began to crop up around 1 p.m. ET (1700 GMT).
"There are a number of issues currently affecting Facebook products, including gaming streams. Multiple teams are working on it, and we'll update you when we can," Facebook's gaming team said on Twitter as the widespread outages persisted.
The source of the largely resolved problems remains unclear.
