Pascal Oparada
Facebook’s products of WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger have crashed in a global outage that hit millions of users worldwide.
Users of the platforms said they cannot access them on Monday evening Nigerian time.
Downdetector.com, which monitors downtime with popular apps, showed that tens of thousands of users do not have access to the platforms.
Users in Nigeria reported that they could not use the platforms, especially WhatsApp and Instagram, two premium products used mainly in the country for business and communication.
WhatsApp has said in a statement that it is working to restore services to those affected.
“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back and will send an update,” WhatsApp said.
Shortly after the crash, user reports indicated that others like Amazon Web, Google and Twitter were experiencing also.
The Facebook and Instagram websites are still working in Iran, according to initial reports by check-host.com, Jerusalem post said.
Reuters said it could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the services. However, the error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.
DNS 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.