Dubai: Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp experienced technical issues for over two hours on Sunday, leaving millions of users worldwide disappointed.
Users in many countries, including those in the UAE, took to Twitter on Sunday to complain that they encountered problems getting on any of the platforms. Newsfeeds were reportedly not loading and users were unable to post any updates and send messages.
“Facebook servers are acting up again. This seems to be a never-ending story with this platform they are running these days,” said one user.
“It’s been down for hours now. I can now use Facebook messenger, but the other services are still unavailable. It just says that I’m not connected to the internet,” said another at 6:48pm, Dubai time.
According to DownDetector, which tracks outages, Facebook started having issues at 6:36am (EDT).
A heatmap of outage reports showed that issues were experienced by Facebook users in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, Georgia, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Italy, Switzerland and a lot of other countries in Europe, as of 4pm, Dubai time.
Issues were also reported in some parts of the United States, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Pakistan, Nepal, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia.
With three of the popular sites unavailable, users have turned to Twitter to voice out their complaints. It is not yet clear what's behind the outages.
At around 4pm, the outage tracking site recorded more than 14,000 incidents of people having issues with Facebook. Most of the problems had to do with the platform’s newsfeed, reported by 39 per cent of the users, while about a third claimed there was a “total blackout” and a further 30 per cent said they had trouble logging in.
Also at around the same time, DownDetector logged 7,748 incidents for Instagram and 3,078 for WhatsApp.
The massive disruption lasted for more than two hours, but a spokesperson for the social media giant assured that everything is now back to normal.
“Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps,” a spokesperson told The Verge. “The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
