Major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a major outage on Monday, affecting potentially thousands of millions of users as the tracking websites showed.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed outages in densely populated areas such as Washington and Paris and problems were reported as early as 1545 GMT.
The services are apparently not accessible in major cities of Pakistan as well.
The Downdetector revealed that there were more than 20,000 reports of users reporting issues on Facebook or Instagram.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said that Facebook services were affected globally because of a major outage worldwide. “Further details are being collected,” the spokesperson for the authority told.
Facebook services (Facebook, #Instagram, #WhatsApp, Oculus) have been affected internationally due to an outage. Further details are being collected: PTA Spokesperson
— PTA (@PTAofficialpk) October 4, 2021
Users who tried to log on to Facebook in the affected regions were met with the following notice: “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 spokesperson Andy Stone said on Twitter.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” the official declared.
Facebook has also experienced similar problems using its apps between March and July.
Read More: Instagram Suffers an Hours-Long Outage in Several Parts of the World
Many Facebook users who were using their Facebook credentials to sign in to third-party apps like Pokemon Go and Match Masters had problems.
“If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal,” the puzzle game application Match Masters said on its Twitter account.
The downtime comes just one day after an anonymous whistleblower was interviewed to US television to identify herself after she leaked a cache of papers to the authorities claiming the social media giant was aware its products could be fueling hatred and causing harm to children’s mental health.
Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa She has worked at firms like Google and Pinterest however she stated in an interview on CBS the news program “60 Minutes” that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she’d seen before.
The world’s biggest social media platform has become involved in a controversy caused by Haugen and Haugen, with US lawmakers as well as The Wall Street Journal explaining the ways Facebook was aware that its products which included Instagram that were causing harm to young girls, specifically regarding the body appearance.
