Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Back Up After Brief Outage for Thousands

Facebook's platforms including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram were down for thousands of users on Thursday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Reports by users showed more than 112,000 issues on Facebook's website, while 101,000 Instagram users and 516 WhatsApp users reported problems as of 6pm ET on Thursday (3:30am IST, Friday).

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outages might be affecting a larger number of users.

This is the second major outage affecting the Menlo Park-headquartered company in a month, with another disruption in mid-March causing issues for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users for an hour almost globally.

Other recent major outages included the Microsoft 365 service disruption earlier this month, and another in mid-March.

With a significant number of people working from home across the world thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, such outages have major effects on productivity and call into question the newfound paradigm. Zoom, the video-conferencing service that gained millions of users due to remote work culture the pandemic brought about, also faced an hours-long outage last month.

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