Outage hits the services of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram: Is it the right time to think about Fugu?

WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook services are down for the majority of users. Each of these three apps is owned by Facebook and runs on shared infrastructure. Users have taken to Twitter to complain about outages on these platforms. All three services are showing an error that is, it keeps on refreshing. This is the current situation when we are writing this for you. WhatsApp’s messages are not being sent or received, Instagram cannot refresh its feed, and Facebook’s page takes forever to load. People are literally resorting to Twitter, Snapchat, and even iMessages!

A Facebook spokesperson has emailed India Today Tech a statement about the outage, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Marcus Hutchins, a cyber security expert known by his handle MalwareTech on Twitter, ruled out global cyber-attacks. In a tweet, MalwareTech says, “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are all down due to a BGP configuration error, which means it’s only a matter of time before someone tweets a pew-pew map screenshot and claims it’s a global cyber-attack.” Dane Knecht, senior vice president at Cloudflare, also said that BGP routes have been withdrawn.

In a similar statement, WhatsApp took to Twitter to acknowledge the outage, “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!” Additionally, Facebook has posted on its Twitter account, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Facebook has more than 410 million users in India, and its WhatsApp messenger counts the country as its biggest market with over 530 million users. Instagram has more than 210 million users in India. As per Downdetector data, WhatsApp users are reporting problems with the app and sending messages. Nearly 9,000 crashes have been reported for WhatsApp. Taking a look at Instagram, the website Downdetector gives estimates that approximately 8,000 people have reported issues. This can be attributed to a problem with the server’s connection. In the same vein, approximately 4,000 users reported the Facebook outage on Downdetector, which associated the issue with a website, app, even business ads accounts, and server connection issue.

Earlier in July this year, various online platforms in the country, including Zomato and Paytm, faced temporary disruption in services due to a global outage at internet infrastructure company Akamai Technologies. These kinds of outages are really sudden and of course uninformed. But, are you getting drastically affected at times by these? Do your organizations face a halt to an urgent and unavoidable piece of work? Well, not anymore.

Why be less productive by relying on these renowned social media platforms? Let’s keep our personal and work life separate and carry on with the growth required for oneself. Indeed, this is the right time to think and choose the best communication channel, Fugu!

Not just chats, break all barriers and communicate through audio/video calls right into one single app. Give your organization the best-ever experience, not an outage. Start with Fugu now!