If you recently experienced crashing of your Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook and wondering if there is a problem with the application then you are correct. Many users worldwide recently reported that these three applications were not working after this afternoon. According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 14:49 BST, and are affecting users across the UK and parts of the US and as of now the outrage has broken worldwide.
Most of the Users are facing problem overloading images or other media files. Testing the issue myself I found out that if you send any media file over WhatsApp the receiver receives the file but is unable to download the file. On downloading the file a pop message appears saying “Download failed. Please ask the user to send the file again.” Meanwhile, over on Facebook, the main problem seems to lie in displaying photos, with many users seeing the code in place of pictures. Similar problems can be observed while using Instagram too.
Last time all three of Facebook’s major services broke, the outage lasted for many hours. It later blamed that problem on a server issue that had a knock-on effect on Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook, since the three use shared infrastructure.
“As a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” Facebook posted on Twitter after that previous outage was fixed. “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”
When those problems happened in March, they were said to be perhaps the biggest outage in the history of the internet, hitting millions of people.