There are reports of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram being down and not accessible to users across several parts of the country. Downdetector reported 38,008 reports for WhatsApp, 30,707 reports for Instagram as of 11:03 PM (Indian Standard Time). However, none of the three Facebook-owned platforms have issued any statement so far.
Complaints started surfacing around 10:40 PM., according to Downdetector, which showed that users couldn’t access other Mark Zuckerberg’s apps including Messenger, not just in India. “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson for Facebook told Business Insider.
“The appearance of error messages between services also varies. On Instagram, the outage may manifest as a “5xx Server Error,” while WhatsApp simply shows the clock icon next to messages that aren’t being delivered,” the Android Police reported.
So far, the worst outage in Facebook’s history was in March 2019 when the social network went down for hours. In its response, the company said that it was caused by a cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic. However, today’s downtime is the second one this month for the platform’s users in India.
| Social media platform | Number of monthly active users in India |
| 530 million | |
| YouTube | 448 million |
| 410 million | |
| 210 million | |
| 17.5 million |
Source: Government of India