Thousands of Britons were left unable to send messages this afternoon after popular social media apps Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger “went down”.
Outage monitoring site DownDetector reported huge spikes in the Meta-owned platforms just after 3pm on Friday – with users barred from accessing the platforms up and down the country.
At 3.30pm, the amount of users reporting outages on Facebook Messenger stood at around 150.
But just minutes later, this spiked ten-fold to over 1,700.
Outage monitoring site DownDetector reported huge spikes in the Meta-owned platforms on Friday afternoon
DOWNDETECTOR
On WhatsApp, the figures were even higher.
More than 62,000 Britons reported they could not use the service by 3.45pm.
Of the user reports, 55 per cent of people said they had issues sending messages, 34 per cent warned they ran into problems with WhatsApp servers, and 12 per cent flagged concerns with the app more generally.
Around an hour later, the situation appeared to have resolved, with DownDetector reports tumbling by 4.30pm.
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DownDetector’s ‘heat map’ shows report hotspots in London, Manchester and Glasgow
DOWNDETECTOR
The outage monitor’s “heat map” showed report hotspots in London, Manchester and Glasgow – though as some of Britain’s most populated cities, this should not come as a surprise.
Thousands of Americans were also hit with technical difficulties – more than 8,000 problems were logged in the US at the same time.
The apparent outage comes four years after Meta’s services were hit by a seven-hour blackout which cost the tech giant as much as $100million (£73.5billion, at the time) in lost revenue.
That outage, which hit Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger around the world, was sparked by a faulty update which disconnected its servers from the internet.
Supermarkets from Britain to Australia were hit by a global cyber outage last summer
Reuters
An even more severe global outage last year saw airlines, TV channels, banks and businesses shut down across the world.
In Britain, Sky News was knocked off air, while the UK’s biggest rail company warned passengers to expect disruption due to “widespread IT issues” just as rush hour hit.
Meanwhile, millions who relied on Microsoft 365 apps, like Word, Excel and Microsoft Teams, were left unable to connect because of the outage.
GB News has approached Meta for comment.