Millions of users worldwide, including in India, were left clueless on Wednesday evening when Facebook and its family of apps including WhatsApp and photo-sharing platform Instagram entered a global outage. People took to Twitter to share their experiences. Facebook officially took to Twitter stating that the servers are experiencing some users and a fix will be rolled out soon. The issue persisted for nearly 12 hours from the outage time.
"Everyone moves to Twitter when Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp get down, including me!" tweeted one Indian user. "Social media breakdown is the only thing that unites the world," said another user.
Users faced specific problems rather than the entire app not working. On Facebook, users reported that specific posts or photos did not appear, but that the page was loading.
Millions of users had problems sending photos, videos and voice messages on WhatsApp in India. Only the text messages were being shared on the mobile messaging service.
At Instagram, people failed to upload photos in various parts of the world.
Online outage tracker Down Detector logged several complaints from across the world including in India. Facebook said in a statement that confirmed there is a problem with its apps, and it's "working as quickly as possible" to fix it, and the fix was rolled out after nearly 12 hours. Usually, Facebook fixes such outages in an hour or less than that, but this time around, it took the company nearly 12 hours.
