ISLAMABAD: (Web Desk): Social networking services Facebook and Instagram, and messaging service WhatsApp are all experiencing issues for users worldwide, including in Pakistan.
Facebook and Instagram are both inaccessible, with news feeds refusing to refresh and the main Facebook.com domain unavailable, while WhatsApp messages aren’t being sent or received, The Verge reported on Sunday.
According to traffic-monitoring website DownDetector, Facebook was the first to encounter problems at around 3:28pm [PST], followed by Instagram at 3:33pm and WhatsApp at 3:58pm.
Facebook Inc, which owns and operates all three services, has yet to comment on the disruption. The outage appeared to be affecting both websites and apps.
People took to Twitter to report the outages, with #WhatsAppDown, #InstagramDown and #FacebookDown trending in Pakistan and across the globe.
The outage comes exactly a month after Facebook went down for almost a full day across parts of North America and Europe on March 14. At the time, the social network had said that the outages, which affected users and advertisers worldwide, resulted from a “server configuration change”, AP had reported.
Some media outlets had branded the outage — which also affected Instagram as well as Messenger — as the biggest in Facebook’s history.
Sunday’s outage is yet another publicity problem for a company already dealing with privacy issues and regulatory probes.
Regulators, investigators and elected officials in the US and elsewhere in the world have already been digging into the data sharing practices of Facebook, which has more than two billion users.
The social network’s handling of user data has been a flashpoint for controversy since it admitted last year that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy which did work for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, used an app that may have hijacked the private details of 87 million users.
