New Delhi: WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage. The three apps incidentally are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure. All the three apps stopped working shortly around 20.30 hours (Indian time). Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work, but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems. At times, the WhatsApp simply said ‘not being able to connect’.
WhatsApp acknowledged the outage on Twitter: “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.”
In April, Facebook and Instagram went down for millions of users for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant. People took to ‘DownDetector’ as they were welcomed with ‘sorry something went wrong’ error message from Facebook and Instagram. The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, famed developer Jane Wong noted in a tweet.