WhatsApp and Instagram back up after outage in many countries

Dubai: Internet messaging and VoIP service WhatsApp and Instagram, owned by social media giant Facebook suffered an outage worldwide Friday night before coming back to life.

"WhatApp not working in Dubai, even Instagram," a message on downdetector said at 9.30 pm UAE time.

Many users, including those in India, were unable to access both Instagram and Facebook on Android and iOS. They were greeted with a 'couldn't refresh feed' message.

Downdetector showed there were more than 1.2 million incidents of people reporting issues with Instagram, while over 23,000 users posted about issues with WhatsApp on the website, Reuters reported.

People from many countries, inculding the UAE, Turkey, Oman, Panama, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, parts of US and India have reported service outage.

Services were affected by a number of issues, Facebook later said.

"Multiple teams are working on it (the outage), and we'll update you when we can," Facebook's gaming unit said in a tweet.

The hash tag #whatasappdown started trending soon after on twitter and desperate customers vent their frustration on the microblogging app.

Check out some of their posts on twitter: