Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp restored after major outage affects ‘millions’

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are now back online following a major outage that prevented users from accessing the social media sites for several hours on Sunday.

Website tracker DownDetector received tens of thousands of complaints at around midday yesterday, with many reporting issues with the login screens for the Facebook-owned social media platforms.

Most of the complaints originated from Europe and Asia, says Reuters. Users in South Africa and parts of the US were also affected.

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While the company has announced that all three services are now back online, a small group of users say they are still experiencing problems with logging in today.

The social media firm has yet to reveal what caused the issue, or how many users were impacted. The Sun, however, puts the number of affected users in the “millions”.

The technical issues come just one month after the three platforms experienced their worst outage to date, when millions of users were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for over 24 hours, The Verge reports.

Facebook blamed the issue then on “server configuration change” and apologised for the blackout, the tech site adds.

How did the internet react?

Last month’s outage was still fresh in the minds of users yesterday afternoon, as they once again took to Twitter to poke fun at Facebook.