Why WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram went down?

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook suffered an outage in India and worldwide on Friday night. A lot of users were unable to send or receive messages. Some users also reported that they failed to even log in to WhatsApp Web. As per Downdetector, the issue started at around 10:40PM in India and prevented WhatsApp users from sending or receiving messages on the service for more than an hour. Though, WhatsApp is claiming that the service was only down for 45 minutes.

While the company didn't reveal the exact reason, it did assert that there was a technical issue. "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson told Indian Express.

Apart from WhatsApp, both Facebook and Instagram were also not working for many users. According to popular downtime reporting service, more than 28,500 people reported issues with Instagram and over 34,127 users were witnessing problems with WhatsApp.

The cited source suggests that over 49 percent of WhatsApp users were facing connection issue, 48 percent people were unable to send or receive messages on the platform and 2 percent were not able to log in.

Downdetector showed that around 57 percent Facebook users reported about total blackout and 29 percent were not even able to access the social media app. Around 66 percent of Instagram users were not able to access News Feed as well as its official website. In case you are not aware, Downdetector is a site that monitors outages by collating status reports from users and some other sources.