Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage on Monday, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.
Outage tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington and Paris, with problems being reported from around 1545 GMT. Downdetector showed there were more than 20,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said that Facebook services had been affected internationally due to an outage. “Further details are being collected,” a spokesperson for the authority said.
Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” he said.
Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.
