Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp restored after partial global outage

Social media freaks can now heave a sigh of relief after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services were restored after a partial global shutdown, Arab News reports.

Social media users were sent into a frenzy on Sunday when Facebook and Instagram suffered outages for a number of hours in several parts of the world — including Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

To make matters worse, they could not even use WhatsApp to contact their friends and family as the messaging service also went down.

Downdetector.com, a website monitoring service, cited thousands of outage reports from users from 6:30 a.m. EST, mostly in Europe, northeastern US and the Philippines.

Read also: Hackers compromise Microsoft webmail services

The website also showed that, at the peak of the outage on Sunday, there were more than 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook, 3,000 reports with WhatsApp and 7,000 with Instagram.

When contacted by Arab News, a Facebook spokesperson said that the company was aware of users having had trouble accessing the site and other apps.

Service was resumed around 2:00 p.m. BST, with Facebook confirming everything was back up and running.

“Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps. The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience,” the spokesperson said.

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