Popular social media applications WhatsApp and Instagram owned by parent company Facebook, on Monday night, experienced a technical snag. Users all over the globe experienced outages as the applications stopped working on both the web and smartphones. This happened with Android, iOS and web platforms.

As per reports, DownDetector reported a quick spike in the number of cases of WhatsApp not working for users on October 4. The same issue was observed with Instagram, as well. The outage happened at roughly 9:15 pm IST and has stayed that way for nearly four hours as of 1:20 am IST.

For Facebook users, they were redirected to an error page with a message reading on the screen, saying that their browser could be connected. WhatsApp Web dished out a message saying “this site can’t be reached”. Incoming or outgoing messages on Whatsapp and Instagram were also blocked due to the outage.

Commenting on the problem, Whatsapp tweeted: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”

“Thanks for your patience!” the messaging app added.

Facebook’s outages are rare but when it does, it’s vast in impact because it affects three of the world’s biggest apps.

Commenting on the outage, Facebook said: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!” Instagram said in a statement.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted that the company was facing network issues.

Facebook is often cryptic about the cause of the outages. Even though they fix their bug, they do not tend to explain the reason behind it.

In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.

At the time of writing this article, the servers continued to remain down.

Facebook is going through a major crisis after the whistleblower who was the source of The Wall Street Journal’s series of stories exposing the company’s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions went public on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.