Explained: The impact of latest Whatsapp crash

Late Friday, popular Facebook-owned services WhatsApp and Instagram suffered a global outage, including in India, that lasted for almost 45 minutes, preventing users of these apps from accessing, sending or receiving messages, on these platforms.

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When did the outage occur?

Instant messaging platform WhatsApp and photo-sharing service Instagram went offline just before 11pm IST. It lasted till around 11.45pm for some users, after which they were able to use these services. In addition to these popular apps, other Facebook services like Facebook Gaming streams.

Why did the outage happen?

While a specific reason was not given by Facebook — the parent company of both these apps — a spokesperson for the company attributed the outage to “a technical issue” that “caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services”.

What was the impact of the outage?

In India alone, there are 53 crore WhatsApp users and 21 crore Instagram users. According to popular downtime reporting service Downdetector, over 49% of WhatsApp users were facing connection issue, 48% people were unable to send or receive messages on the platform and 2% were not able to log in. Downdetector also showed that around 66% of Instagram users were not able to access the app’s feed, as well as its official website.

Have such outages occurred before?

In 2020 alone, four major WhatsApp outages had occurred, of which the most major one was in January, which had lasted for around three hours. After this, there was one in April, followed by a two-hour outage in July and a brief one in August.