Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook services are down for the majority of users. Several users have taken to Twitter to report an outage on these platforms. At the time of writing this article, all three services were showing an error that is refreshing. While WhatsApp isn’t sending or receiving messages, Instagram shows “couldn’t refresh the feed.” Similarly, the Facebook page takes forever to load.
All three apps are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure.
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website said.
The message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.
The social-media giant’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 22,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 3,000 users.
Marcus Hutchins, a Cybersecurity expert famous on Twitter with the handle MalwareTech, has ruled out global cyber attack possibility. In a tweet, MalwareTech says, “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are all down due to a BGP configuration error, which means it’s only a matter of time before someone tweets a pew pew map screenshot and claims it’s a global cyber attack.”
In a similarly worded statement, WhatsApp has taken to Twitter to acknowledge the outage, “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”
Instagram’s official communication handle has also tweeted, “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown.”
Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 4, 2021
Facebook has more than 410 million users in India, and its WhatsApp messenger counts the country as its biggest market with over 530 million users. Instagram has over 210 million users in India.
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