Facebook and Instagram users in the US, Canada and parts of Europe face outages; Indian users unaffected

Social media giant  Facebook  was encountered by a rare problem at hand, as at least thousands of users in the US, Canada and parts of Europe reported that the website servers had crashed. Facebook-owned Instagram too was down for thousands, forcing the company into making a public statement.

Users began taking to Twitter at around 10:00 pm (IST) on 11 October to report that services were down on the two websites. “Earlier today, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Facebook services. We quickly investigated and started restoring access within about an hour, and we have nearly fixed the issue for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge.

Outage monitoring website DownDetector showed that there were over 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook while over 2,500 reported an Instagram outage. DownDetector’s live website outage tracker, however, does reveal that the issue has been resolved and that both websites are back up.

CurrentlyDown, another similar outage tracking website also showed that both Facebook and Instagram were up. Affected Instagram users, however, confirmed on Twitter that the outage did not involve a complete blackout but the inability to post a ‘story’ or an image on Instagram.

Users in Asia were left mostly unaffected by the outage with both websites up and running in India.

With inputs from Reuters