Ever imagined your life without Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp? This nightmare for most became a reality on Wednesday when all the three services – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – suffered an outage that spanned over hours. The services were impacted due to technical issues. The outage affected scores of users in multiple parts of the world.
A number of users voiced their frustration over the outage. Some complained that they were unable to send or receive any messages on the platforms. Some even said that they were not able to view certain images on the page and some said they couldn’t upload photos and videos. According to Down Detector, the issues began at 1200 GMT and affected users in Europe, the US, South America, and Japan the most. Glitches were reported from other parts of the world including India as well.
The users of WhatsApp were also impacted by a similar problem last night as they could not send or receive photos, videos and voice messages. Instead, the users were shown a message that read download failed and the error message instructed the users to ask the user to send the image all over again.
Facebook owns both Instagram and WhatsApp. When users reported the issue to the social networking platform, the company later clarified the issue by tweeting “Earlier today, some people and businesses experienced trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps and platforms. The issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100% for everyone. We’re sorry for any inconvenience,”
The global outage affected the users in the US, Europe, as well as India and these, are considered to the company’s most important markets.
A Facebook spokesperson later clarified what triggered the global outrage. He explained that the users experienced the technical issue due to the routine maintenance operation that accidentally activated a bug that caused the users finding difficulty to upload images, videos and voice messages.
“During one of our routine maintenance operations, we triggered an issue that is making it difficult for some people to upload or send photos and videos.”
More than 14,000 users complained about issues with Instagram, whereas users more than 7,500 and 1,600 users reported about Facebook and WhatsApp respectively.
Since the problem has been resolved, the social networking platform gave a statement apologising to its users saying, “Earlier today, some people and businesses experienced trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps and platforms. The issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100% for everyone. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
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