Facebook was hit with a major outage today, July 3rd 2019, as users around the world reported photos not uploading and displaying correctly. The outage also affected Facebook-owned apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
If you’ve been seeing blank gray or broken icons in places where photos should be, it’s not just you!
Starting at around 10am EST (7am PST), users of Facebook and Instagram began reporting that photos weren’t showing up after being uploaded.
Many photos were replaced with broken image icons, but since Facebook includes AI-generated descriptions of photos for the visually impaired, many photos were also replaced with text descriptions.
Downdetector reports that “Pictures” has been the most reported problem, and its outage map shows reports flooding in from all over the world.
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Facebook and Instagram soon acknowledged that they were experiencing issues… #instagramdown
The outage has been going on for over three hours so far, at the time of this writing.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps,” Facebook writes.
“We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”