FB, Whatsapp, Instagram hit by massive global outage: Tracker

SAN FRANCISCO: Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp were hit by a massive outage on Monday, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.

The company said it was “aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app” and it was working on restoring access.

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 9.15pm IST. It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York and Europe.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the services. However, the error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations.

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

Meanwhile, 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, with more than 850,000 tweets.

FB asks judge to dismiss US antitrust suit, again

Facebook asked a judge on Monday to dismiss the US government’s revised antitrust case that seeks to force the social media giant to sell Instagram and Whatsapp after he threw out an earlier version in June.

It said in a court filing that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had failed to provide a “factual basis for branding Facebook an unlawful monopolist” and that the FTC “had no basis for its...allegation that Facebook has or had a monopoly”.