Facebook Inc's suite of apps. [Courtesy]
Facebook on Monday night apologised as millions of its users reported problems accessing its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook's communications department, tweeted on Monday: “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.”
WhatsApp on its part thanked its users for their patience in a statement posted on its official Twitter account.
The tweet read: "We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”
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The popular social media platforms including Instagram went down on Monday evening in a major outage affecting millions around the world.
According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 6.44 pm, and are affecting users globally.
Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.
Meanwhile, the social-media giant's instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 22,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 3,000 users.
WhatsApp was also trending on Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), with more than 850,000 tweets.
A similar issue with the three apps was recorded in April 2019, when they crashed for around two hours before resuming normal operations.
The July 2019 crash was linked a “routine maintenance operation” accidentally triggered a bug that made it difficult for users to upload or send photos and videos
“A “routine maintenance operation” accidentally triggered a bug that made it difficult for users to upload or send photos and videos,” a Facebook spokesperson told the media after the outage.
In March 2019, another outage lasting as long as 24 hours that hit Facebook services was blamed on a “server configuration change”.
The March 13 outage was believed to be the worst ever for the internet giant, which reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people with its core social network, Instagram and messaging applications.
