Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffer brief outage, second in a month

Earlier on Thursday, outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed that more than 154,100 reports of outage on Facebook were recorded. Instagram reported 80,200 such outages and Whatsapp reported 1,300 outages according to the tracking website.

Social media platform Facebook said on Thursday that services on its platforms including Instagram and Whatsapp were fully restored after thousands of users reported connectivity issues for more than an hour. "A configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people. We quickly investigated and resolved the issue," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

Facebook suffered its second outage in less than a month as an outage was reported on March 19th which took the sites offline for several hours. (Reuters)

Earlier on Thursday, outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed that more than 154,100 reports of outage on Facebook were recorded. Instagram reported 80,200 such outages and Whatsapp reported 1,300 outages according to the tracking website.

Users reported about the outage on micro-blogging site Twitter. Upon opening Facebook users saw the error message “sorry something went wrong”. The Facebook Messenger app also did not work during the outage. Although, Facebook’s status page did not chang to reflect the outage while it was occurring.

"We're sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again," said the Instagram app when users tired to access any part of the app.

WhatsApp had a similar issue, with a 'Connecting' and circular icon near the top of the app as users said they were not able to send messages using the app.

With this, the social media giant suffered its second outage in less than a month as an outage was reported on March 19th which took the sites offline for several hours. The outage was similar to the one on Thursday as it also impacted both Whatsapp and Instagram. Facebook had then said that the outage occurred due to a technical issue.

"A technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologise for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson said.

Facebook has 2.8 billion monthly active users by the end of 2020, out of which 1.8 billion use the app on a daily basis, according to the company.