WhatsApp was down on Friday night for close to an hour. Millions of users across the world and in India found that WhatsApp stopped working around 11 PM. Instagram and Facebook Messenger too suffered outage around the same time. The services, including WhatsApp, were back online around 45 minutes later, close to midnight.

When WhatsApp was down, not only users failed to send any messages but the chat app in itself was failing to connect to WhatsApp servers.

WhatsApp was down for several users globally. Additionally, Instagram is also down for several users, as per the DownDetector site. When we first reported the issue on this page, over 11,000 people registered issues with WhatsApp service on Downdetector while almost 12,000 people registered problems with Instagram.

Soon after a few minutes, there were over 38,000 people that registered issues with the WhatsApp service on Downdetector. Instagram, on the other hand, saw almost 30,000 people registered problems after some time.

Below is a chart that shows how many people registered issues with WhatsApp.

WhatsApp down report on Downdetector

Within minutes of finding that WhatsApp was suffering an outage, users rushed to Twitter to see whether the problem was with their phone or if others were reporting the same issue. And they indeed find from others that the WhatsApp outage was global.

Currently, it is not clear what WhatsApp suffered the outrage, though given the fact that Instagram and Facebook Messenger too were down shows that the problem was with Facebook servers.

Facebook and WhatsApp have not yet commented officially on the glitch. Even the Twitter account of WhatsApp, which is fairly active otherwise, is currently silent, leaving hundreds of millions of users in the dark.

However, the Facebook Gaming account on Twitter did confirm that there was some problem with Facebook services. In a tweet, it said, “There are a number of issues currently affecting Facebook products, including gaming streams. Multiple teams are working on it, and we’ll update you when we can.”

On DownDetector, at its peak WhatsApp related reports spiked to over 1 lakh. However, after around 11.40pm when WhatsApp started working again, the number of down reports also came down sharply. The same happened with Instagram and Facebook Messenger which too are now back online.

Apart from WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook Messenger was also down for several users globally on Friday. However, the spike was way less when compared to WhatsApp and Instagram, as seen on the Downdetector website.