NFApost DelhiWhatsApp and Instagram were down for over half-an-hour globally. The outage was first reported by users on Twitter around 11 pm. Downdetector reported 38,008 reports for WhatsApp, 30,707 reports for Instagram as of 11:03 PM (Indian Standard Time) on 20th March.
People tweeted that one of the world’s most popular instant messaging apps had not been working for some time. Some Instagram and Facebook Messenger users also reported that the apps had been down.
The outage tracking website downdetector.com reported that the apps were not working globally for over 30 minutes. The present downtime is the second one this month for the platform’s users in India.
“The appearance of error messages between services also varies. On Instagram, the outage may manifest as a “5xx Server Error,” while WhatsApp simply shows the clock icon next to messages that aren’t being delivered,” the Android Police reported.
No messages were getting delivered on WhatsApp and Messenger, users tweeted, while no content could be loaded on the photo- and video-sharing app Instagram.
Commenting on the development, Facebook stated earlier on Sunday, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. “We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” states Facebook.
Between 11 pm and 11:40 pm, Downdetector showed there were more than 1.2 million incidents of people reporting issues with Instagram, while over 23,000 users posted about issues with WhatsApp on the website.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
Signal tweeted a swipe on the WhatsApp downtime. “Signal registrations are through the roof; welcome everyone! Solidarity to the folks working on the WhatsApp outage. People outside of the tech industry will never understand how weird it sounds when someone says that they are “looking forward to some weekend downtime,” Signal tweeted on its official handle.
So far, the worst outage in Facebook’s history was in March 2019 when the social network went down for hours. In its response, the company said that it was caused by a cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic.
