MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Sunday outages for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users

Down Detector indicated that there were more than 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook at its peak

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users on Sunday experienced difficulties accessing the social network sites and messaging service. According to the Down Detector website, Facebook began experiencing technical issues at about 6.30am US Eastern Time with users affected worldwide.

Instagram and WhatsApp, which are both owned by Facebook, also faced accessibility issues, leaving some users unable to load their newsfeed or send messages.

Down Detector's outage service maps showed that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India and the Philippines reported encountering issues with the platforms.

Down Detector indicated that there were more than 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook at its peak, but that figure dropped to about 2,000 reports.

The outage monitoring website also showed that, at the peak on Sunday, there were more than 3,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Whatsapp and 7,000 with Instagram.

Facebook and Instagram users told the outage monitoring website that they were either unable to view their newsfeeds or log into the social networking service, both via their website browsers and mobile applications.

Meanwhile, WhatsApp users said they experienced issues connecting to or logging into the messaging platform while others could not send or receive messages. 

Facebook experienced one of its longest outages in March, when some users around the globe faced trouble accessing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than 24 hours.