Millions of social media users globally were yesterday shut out as the major platforms Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram went down for hours. Users across Nigeria and other parts of the world could no longer send or receive text messages, pictures, documents, and videos.
Voice and video calls were also impacted by the outage, which has taken down a number of other popular Facebook-owned services, including Instagram and the main Facebook social media app as well as Facebook Gaming. The issues have hit users on iPhone, Android, and those who rely on WhatsApp for Web to send messages from their web browser, like Google Chrome.
While this is not the first time the platforms would experience downtime, past incidences had been for an hour at most. The services which went off around 4.30 pm Nigerian time, remained inaccessible three hours after and could not be accessed even as of the time of filing this report.
WhatsApp has acknowledged the issues impacting users across the globe. The firm shared the update on Twitter as the outage approached its one-hour milestone: "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." The messaging platform did not confirm when users can expect normal service to resume.
The websites and apps for all of the services were responding with server errors. It was not clear, as of press time, what caused the outage. In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook said that outage was caused by a technical issue.
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