You may have had trouble messaging anyone on Facebook or Instagram this morning. A service failure has resulted in Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs for many users, with new messages not being sent and old messages not being loaded.
The shutdown seems to have begun about 4:30 AM ET and got worse (or at least more widely noticed) in the next few hours. The Downdetector website, which tracks website outages, reported an increase in users reporting problems with these services that peaked around 8:30 a.m.
Facebook says the disturbance has since been fixed. “Some people have had problems sending or receiving messages earlier today on Messenger, Instagram, or Workplace Chat. The problem has since been resolved and we’re sorry for any inconvenience,” the Facebook representative wrote to The Verge in an email.
Service outages happen every now and then but the breadth of the current disruption is in many respects Facebook’s own doing. The organization has incorporated Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs. Now that they’re sharing resources, it seems that an outage for one could mean an outage for the other, too.