Wilson Chipangura, Guest Reporter
Facebook Inc’s suite of apps, including popular photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, were down for tens of thousands of users, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
No immediate announcement has been made on the issue affecting the services. However, the error message on Facebook’s webpage has been attributed to a Domain Name System (DNS) error by tech experts.
DNS usually allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.
Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.
The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.
Meanwhile, 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.
WhatsApp was also trending on Twitter, with more than 850,000 tweets.
“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment,” the messaging platform’s official Twitter handle said.
“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”
