How to know for sure if Facebook (or any social network) is down

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff.

In the past couple of months, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks have faced a lot of outages. But how can you make sure that if the site’s actually down or if it’s just your phone or network provider?

There are multiple ways to do it. First, you can check the official source of each site.

• For Facebook, you can head to its developer dashboard.

• Twitter has a developer status board for its APIs.

But not all these boards present information in an understandable and friendly manner. That’s where other websites like Downdetector and Outage Report come in.

• Head to downdetector.com or outage.report.
• All the major sites are listed as icons on the home page, if you don’t find a site that you’re looking for there, you can search for it.
• Once you click on a site that you want to check status of, down detector will show a dashboard with the current status, and number of outage reports