Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram faced a major global outage on Monday evening with thousands of users around the world being locked out of these digital platforms.
Facebook owns photosharing platform Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp.
The outage is estimated to have started around 9pm IST. Users complained of not being able to use any of the three services.
“We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
What happened
- The company did not specify the reason for the global outage. Though the error message on the webpage of Facebook Inc suggested a problem with Domain Name System (DNS).
- The problem also appears to be affecting Facebook’s virtual reality arm, Oculus. As per The Verge, users could load games they already had installed and the browser worked, but social features or installing new games did not.
- Downdetector – which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.
- WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.
- Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
Source: The Economic Times
