Facebook services including WhatsApp and Instagram suffer global outage

Facebook Inc said on Friday its services were being affected by a number of issues, after nearly a million people across the world reported problems with its photo-sharing app Instagram.

“Multiple teams are working on it (the outage), and we’ll update you when we can,” Facebook’s gaming unit said in a tweet.

Tens of thousands of users took to Twitter to complain about the outage, with #whatsappoutage trending in many countries, including India.

Users reported seeing error alerts when they opened the apps — which share common technology under Facebook — and were unable to send or receive messages.

The major outage was reported at around 1730 GMT, according to Downdetector. However, shortly after 1800 GMT, several Whatsapp users said on social media that they were able to again send messages on the app.

Instagram also came back after about an hour.

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed there were nearly one million incidents of people reporting issues with Instagram, while nearly 20,000 users posted about problems with WhatsApp on the website.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.