Facebook Outage: Twitter, TikTok, More Buckle As Social Refugees Flood Rivals

Most of you already know this, but Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have been down for most of the day. What might be even more surprising than those three services being down for more than a few minutes at a time is the fact that this outage is having a noticeable knock-on effect on the rest of the internet. In fact, many other social media websites are buckling under the strain of Facebook and Instagram users who are flocking to other services.

It isn't just limited to one or two social media sites that are struggling, either. Instead, most social media sites and communication services of note are showing issues at the moment, whether it's Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Signal, or Telegram. If nothing else, this serves as a great reminder of the sheer number of people who visit Facebook and Instagram throughout an average day.

For proof that these websites are struggling, we turn to none other than DownDetector, which shows a large spike of user reports this afternoon for Twitter. Twitter is probably the closest rival to Facebook these days, so it makes sense that people would wind up there while Facebook remains inaccessible.

While Down Detector shows that Twitter may have a handle on things (at least at the time of this writing), that is not the case for Snapchat, which appears to be in the middle of a large spike in user reports. Similarly, users of WhatsApp competitor Signal have been reporting problems since before noon EDT today, shortly after the problems at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp became apparent.

So, even when Facebook and Instagram are down, they're still ruining things for people across the internet. If you're having issues at any of the sites mentioned above, you can take heart in the fact that you aren't alone, but things probably aren't going to get better until Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have returned. We'll let you know when that happens, so stay tuned for more.