As per reports on Downdetector, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are not working for many users. Over 21,000 reported problems with WhatsApp, while close to 20,000 reports were lodged for Instagram on Friday at 10:53 PM IST. There is no word yet on why the Facebook-owned applications were facing outages around the world.
Update: Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram have resumed service around 11:35pm IST and appear to be working normally. Story continues as is below.
As usual, people flocked to Twitter to make light of the situation with jokes and memes. Take a look:
Twitter bosses looking at the masses swarming like …#instagramdown #whatsappdown #FridayVibes pic.twitter.com/cCu5TPKebU
— Nathan Kerr ♛ (@nate_kerr) March 19, 2021
Le students who get their zoom link for exams on whatsapp :#whatsappdown pic.twitter.com/UgSjuIJf4R
— ☁️🍃 (@lowkeylofiiii) March 19, 2021
Looks like Mark Zuckerberg is having a break 😉🍫 #whatsappdown
— KITKAT (@KITKAT) March 19, 2021
Me waiting for instagram and whatsapp to work again. #whatsappdown pic.twitter.com/0jkY0yLnJ2
— 𝙔𝘼𝙎𝙃 𝘿𝙒𝙄𝙑𝙀𝘿𝙄 🇮🇳 (@YashDwivedi17_) March 19, 2021
Facebook-owned services seldom go down, with the last major outage being in November 2018, when the main app as well as Instagram were down in several countries. However, a more recent service disruption that brought consumers to a standstill was in December 2020, when Google services like Gmail, Drive, Meet, Assistant, Hangouts, YouTube, Docs, etc stopped working for half an hour or so.