However, outside of accessing social media, for what other important activities – measured in time spent – do you use your smartphone? It thus meant that the late-morning, lunch, afternoon and early evening social media fix that many of us enjoy was not available. Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4) and ended around 6:30 p.m. Besides entertainment, we may not have much use for a phone Here are four lessons we believe can be learnt from the outage.ġ. However, with Instagram and WhatsApp, in particular being offline, many of us had a lot of free time on our hands, and a lot of time to think. It meant that these services were not available for the 2.9 billion monthly active users of Facebook, the 1.3 billion of Facebook Messenger, the 1 billion active users of Instagram, and the 2 billion monthly active users of WhatsApp.įrom all reports, it appears that the outage was due to errors made during routine server maintenance, which not only affected Facebook Inc.’s very public platforms, but also those used internally within the organisation.

On Monday, 4 October, and for about six hours, major online platforms owned by Facebook Inc., including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, were offline worldwide. We offer four takeaways from the experience. On 4 October 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced a global outage, plunging a large portion of social media into darkness.

Countries affected by whatsapp outage