New Delhi: Social media giant Facebook along with its subsidiary platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced one of its longest global outages on Monday night after the services remained non-functional at least for over five hours.
The exact reason for the outage has not been established as yet.
Facebook took to Twitter to acknowledge the problem after several users complained of issues in accessing the social media site. “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 apologise for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson tweeted.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021
India has one of the highest numbers of users of Facebook as well as its other platforms. As per government data shared earlier this year, India has 53 crore WhatsApp users, 41 crore Facebook users and 21 crore Instagram users.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Facebook chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer said the social media company was experiencing “networking issues” and teams were working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.
As the Facebook-owned sites remained down, users took to alternative sites, including Twitter, Telegram, and Signal to connect with each other. While there have been similar outages in the past, the issues were resolved within a short time. However, on Monday, the sites remained down for as long as five hours.
WhatsApp services resumed early on Monday morning, while Facebook and Instagram users continued to face issues.
We’re now back and running at 100%.
Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day.
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 5, 2021
