Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp down for users worldwide
LAHORE (92 Web Desk) – Social networking services Facebook, Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp are all experiencing issues for users worldwide, including in Pakistan.
According to the media reports, Facebook and Instagram are both inaccessible, with news feeds refusing to refresh and the main Facebook.com domain unavailable on Sunday.
WhatsApp messages aren’t being sent or received, and users of Facebook’s main services (Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp) have headed to Twitter to share that they’re having issues.
Facebook Inc, which owns and operates all three services, did not issue any comment on the disruption.
People took to Twitter to report the outages, with #WhatsAppDown, #InstagramDown and #FacebookDown trending in Pakistan and across the globe.
The outage comes exactly a month after Facebook went down for almost a full day across parts of North America and Europe on March 14. At the time, the social network had said that the outages, which affected users and advertisers worldwide, resulted from a “server configuration change”, AP had reported.
Some media outlets had branded the outage — which also affected Instagram as well as Messenger — as the biggest in Facebook's history. Sunday's outage is yet another publicity problem for a company already dealing with privacy issues and regulatory probes.
Regulators, investigators and elected officials in the US and elsewhere in the world have already been digging into the data sharing practices of Facebook, which has more than two billion users.
The social network's handling of user data has been a flashpoint for controversy since it admitted last year that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy which did work for Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign, used an app that may have hijacked the private details of 87 million users.
The number of reports on the crowd-sourced DownDetector website – one of the internet’s most used sources of numbers on outages – peaked at just over 12,000, gradually falling to a couple of hundreds by early Thursday.
The BBC and a handful of other media outlets said it was the platform’s longest ever outage. Reuters was not immediately able to verify those claims.
Facebook representatives took to Twitter to update users on the problems.
A Facebook spokesman, asked by Reuters for more details, would only repeat the company’s initial statement on the outage on Wednesday, saying that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps were down for much of Wednesday, although the photo-sharing social network said it was back up early on Thursday. Facebook was yet to provide an update on its other services.
“Anddddd… we’re back,” Instagram tweeted here along with a GIF image of Oprah Winfrey screaming in excitement.
Social media users in some parts of the United States and Europe as well as in Japan were hit by the disruption, according to DownDetector’s live outage map here
Facebook struggles into day two of global outage
Earlier on March 14, Facebook Inc struggled to restore its services fully after a 17-hour partial outage made the world’s largest social network inaccessible to users across the globe, driving a wave of online complaints.
But with thousands of users complaining on Twitter under the hashtag #facebookdown, a number of media reports put the number affected in the millions.
