What to do? Widespread outage on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook - worldwide

July 3, 2019   

When technology took over our lives: Users around the world have been complaining since this afternoon about glitches and disruptions in WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. According to the website downdetector, which provides a snapshot of the status of messaging services, the problem appears to be felt mainly in Central Europe, the Middle East, including Israel, and South America. At this stage, it is not clear what caused the problems, which are not uniform in every country and for every user. For some users, it is not possible to send or listen to audio recordings, while others are unable to download images they have received, but can send them themselves.

Users posted on Twitter that this was a deliberate move to prevent Ethiopian protest organizers from communicating via social media, but the glitch is more widespread and, as mentioned, is disrupting users in various places around the world.

A Facebook spokesperson said in response: "We are aware that people are currently experiencing difficulty uploading photos, videos, and other files using our apps. We are working to restore the situation as quickly as possible.".

According to WhatsApp, the world's most popular messaging service has over 1.5 billion users in 180 countries. Of the 1.5 billion users, about a billion are active daily, with India being the app's largest market. There are about 200 million users there alone, and some estimate that the number of users has risen to 300 million. 29 million messages are sent every minute, and no less than 65 billion messages are sent every day.