INDIA. Mumbai: Social networking websites WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook suffered an outage on Monday night in India and some parts of the world as the global outage started at around 9.15 pm in India.
The users were not able to send or receive messages on WhatsApp. On Instagram too, users were unable to log in and refresh the feed, while on Facebook, users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
WhatsApp tweeted that it’s trying to fix the glitch. “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!” it wrote.
Instagram also acknowledged the outage and tweeted: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown.”
NetBlocks, the internet’s observatory that tracks disruptions and shutdowns, said the outage isn’t country-specific. “Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger are currently experiencing outages in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.” Outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed there were more than 20,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.
A similar global outage had occurred in July when several online streaming platforms, such as Disney+Hotstar, Sonyliv, Zomato, Paytm, and even new websites like ESPN went down after a crash at cloud service provider Akamai.
Technology outages are not uncommon, but to have so many apps go dark from the world’s largest social media company at the same time was highly unusual. Facebook’s last significant outage was in 2019 when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours, which is a reminder that even the most powerful internet companies can be crippled by a snafu.
Security experts said the problem most likely stemmed instead from a misconfiguration of Facebook’s server computers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp.
