Networking bug caused Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp outages

Most affected users experienced problems for less than 90 minutes and the problem was not specific to a particular region.

Facebook Inc on Monday said a technical problem prevented some users from accessing and posting on the social network as well as messaging app Whatsapp and Instagram, and it had mostly fixed the issue. (Reuters File Photo)

Facebook and its other social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp temporarily went down late on Monday in the US, Canada and various other parts of the world, including in India.

People took to Twitter, reporting about the outages across Facebook platforms which were later restored. Facebook blamed a networking issue for the temporary outages.

"Earlier today, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing or posting to various Facebook services," Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow said in a statement.

"We quickly investigated and started restoring access, and we have nearly fixed the issue for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience," he added.

According to globalnews.ca, Down Detector, a portal that monitors website malfunctions and outages, first reported the outage.

The hashtag #FacebookDown was trending on Twitter.

"You know why Twitter users never run to Facebook when it's down? Cause it rarely ever is, because they don't update their site every 27 minutes!!!" tweeted one user.