Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp restored after global outage

New Delhi : Social networking giant Facebook, Instagram including the instant messaging app WhatsApp were down globally. The services were restored after a 45 minute long outage.

WhatsApp informed in a tweet and said, “Thanks for your patience, that was a long 45 minutes but we are back! “.

Thanks for your patience, that was a long 45 minutes but we are back! #WhatsAppDown

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) March 19, 2021

The issue started some time around 10.40 pm IST according to the Downdetector website. Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Twitter users also reported issues with these apps. While users were not able to refresh their WhatsApp feed, Instagram showed errors.

Later, Downdetector showed 21,000-plus users facing issues with WhatsApp at around 10.54 pm. The outage seems to have affected a large number of Instagram users as well. The website showed more than 1.2 million incidents of users reporting issues with Instagram.

Why this outage occurred is not yet clear. Facebook’s gaming unit also confirmed the outage in a tweet from its official handle.

There are a number of issues currently affecting Facebook products, including gaming streams. Multiple teams are working on it, and we'll update you when we can.

— Facebook Gaming (@FacebookGaming) March 19, 2021

Facebook services were last down for several users globally in December 2020.