Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for millions of users, including in Bharat, on Monday evening, as they were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms.
“We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Andy Stone, Facebook communications executive said in a tweet.
According to DownDetector, a website that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 per cent users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22 per cent had problems with the web version.
People took to Twitter to report the problems they were facing with Facebook family apps, including posting memes and GIFs.
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.
“All of us coming to Twitter to see if Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are really down,” a user tweeted. “Everyone rushing to Twitter to see if WhatsApp is actually down,” another tweeted.
“Instagram down, Facebook down, WhatsApp down. You know who’s in-charge now?” another user posted. Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again.
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.
All three social media platforms are owned by by the social media giant Facebook, Inc. that is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Many experts are questioning whether such a hegemony of one company is healthy as it can lead to over-dependence and authoritarian tendencies. This outage also shows why building our own social media platforms like China has done is critical to digital sovereignty and stability.
(With IANS inputs)
