Meta Fixes Issue With Instagram, Facebook and Messenger After Brief Outage

Meta Platforms said on Friday it has fixed the issue that was preventing users from accessing its social media platforms.

“Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble accessing our products,” a Meta spokesperson said.

More than 11,000 users across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger had reported issues with accessing the apps, sending messages and logging into their accounts, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

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

Meta’s messaging app WhatsApp had faced a global outage just earlier this week, which was later resolved.

According to statistics from website and app downtime tracking service Downdetector, users in India began to report issues with accessing WhatsApp at around 12:30pm earlier this week on October 25, with about 2,610 reports.

In a late night statement on Tuesday, WhatsApp said a “technical error” caused the outage. “The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved,” a Meta company spokesperson had said.

Downdetector’s user reports from users in the UK were at 63,930, while there were 4,248 and 26,043 reports from users in Brazil and Spain, respectively.

In India, Downdetector’s “heat-map” suggested that Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and other regions appear to be the most affected by the downtime.

WhatsApp Web and WhatsApp’s desktop apps, which work independently of a connected phone’s internet connection, also appear to be similarly affected by the outage.

The IT Ministry was reported to have asked WhatsApp to submit a report explaining the outage issue. Union Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also confirmed this, saying, “We have lakhs of WhatsApp users across the country and we asked for a detailed report from the company about the outage.”

The social media platform has now submitted its report to the IT ministry on the service outage, according to government sources.