Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users faced a temporary outage earlier today. Facebook and its other social media platforms temporarily went down late on Monday in the United States, Canada and various other parts of the world, including in India. Facebook blamed a networking issue for the temporary outages. People took to Twitter, reporting about the outages across Facebook platforms which were later restored. "Earlier today, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing or posting to various Facebook services," Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow said in a statement.
"We quickly investigated and started restoring access, and we have nearly fixed the issue for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience," he added. According to globalnews.ca, Down Detector, a portal that monitors website malfunctions and outages, first reported the outage.
The hashtag #FacebookDown was trending on Twitter. "You know why Twitter users never run to Facebook when it's down? Cause it rarely ever is, because they don't update their site every 27 minutes!!!" tweeted one user.
This is not the first time the Facebook-owned platforms faced a network outage. Earlier this year, WhatsApp went down for more than an hour. For the unaware, WhatsApp has completely shifted its servers to Facebook, so going forward, if Facebook goes down, then WhatsApp users will likely face issues in accessing the service.
