On Friday night, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook suffered an outage in India and around the world. Many users were unable to send or receive messages. Some users also reported that they did not even log into WhatsApp Web. According to Downdetector, the problem started around 10:40 p.m. in India and prevented WhatsApp users from sending or receiving messages on the service for more than an hour. However, WhatsApp claims that the service was only interrupted for 49 minutes.
Although the company did not disclose the exact reason, it did claim that there was a technical issue. “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing certain Facebook services. We have fixed this issue for everyone and we apologize for any inconvenience, ”a Facebook spokesperson said. Indian Express.
Apart from WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram also didn’t work for many users. According to the popular downtime reporting service, more than 28,500 people have reported issues with Instagram and more than 34,127 users have witnessed issues with WhatsApp.
The quoted source suggests that over 49% of WhatsApp users were facing connection issues, 48% of people were unable to send or receive messages on the platform, and 2% were unable to to log in.
Downdetector showed that around 57% of Facebook users reported a blackout and 29% were not even able to access the social media app. About 66% of Instagram users were unable to access the news feed or its official website. In case you didn’t know, Downdetector is a site that monitors outages by gathering status reports from users and some other sources.
Moreover, this is not the first time that services have been impacted. In December 2020, WhatsApp went alongside Instagram and Facebook for a few hours, before services were restored.