Phone apps for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, among other social networks on a smartphone in Chennai, India, on March 22, 2018. (Arun Sankar/AFP/File)
Major social media services, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, were hit by a massive outage on Monday, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.
Outage tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington and Paris.
In Israel, where the majority of mobile communication is carried out via WhatsApp, users reported that the messaging service was down, as were Facebook and Instagram.
The Downdetector later also reported outage issues on Amazon, Google, Twitter and other sites, although they did not appear to be worldwide.
WhatsApp said Monday evening that it was working to restore service to the messaging app.
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“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment,” tweeted the company, which was purchased by Facebook in 2014. “We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”
This illustration picture shows social media applications logos from Linkedin, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter displayed on a smartphone on May 28, 2020. (Olivier DOULIERY / AFP)
Instagram is also owned by Facebook.
Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
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“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter.
Such outages have occurred multiple times in the past, and tend to be resolved within a few hours.
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