WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have gone down in several parts of the world, users reported on Monday evening.
All three apps are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure.
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website said.
The message 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.
WhatsApp acknowledged the outage on Twitter. Facebook issued the same statement through a spokesperson.
Users posted messages on Twitter saying the popular social networking and communication platforms were inaccessible from around 9 pm Indian time.
The website downdetector.com, which tracks web services, also 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.
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.
WhatsApp was also trending on Twitter Inc, with more than 850,000 tweets, including banter between the tech companies.
Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.
Facebook shares on NASDAQ fell 5.5 per cent in afternoon trading on Monday, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.
All three Facebook properties are market leaders in India in their categories of instant messaging, photo sharing and social networking.
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 over 210 million users in India.
Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
The outage comes a day after a whistleblower went on US television to reveal her identity after she leaked a trove of documents to authorities alleging the company knew its products were fueling hate and harming children’s mental health.
Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest — but said in an interview with CBS news show “60 Minutes” that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen before.
