According to Down Detector – one of the most trusted troubleshooting sites – the servers for each of the sites, which are all property of the Facebook, Inc holding company owned by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, have been out of action for nearly 45 minutes at time of publication.
Downdetector showed a sharp increase in reports of issues from that time. Users recorded more than 33,000 reports at one stage for just WhatsApp. Numerous users flocked to Twitter to complain about the outage, with WhatsApp trending at #1 in South Africa with 768,000 tweets half an hour later. Texts, voice, and video calls on WhatsApp were not working, while Facebook and Instagram feeds would not refresh or load uncached content. The desktop sites were also completely inaccessible. The image below shows the message users were presented with when attempting to access the Facebook and WhatsApp websites.