New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…
Original story (published on March 19, 2021) follows:
Instagram and WhatsApp just went down, seemingly across the world, and this is pretty evident from various ‘down detector’ sites that have seen a huge spike in their graphs owing to thousands of reports.
The outage apparently began around 10 minutes ago (around 10:55 PM IST) and has still not been resolved as of the time of this article’s writing. Nonetheless, other apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are still running just fine.
Moreover, Twitter and other social media platforms have also just been swarmed by thousands of recent tweets all ranting about the Instagram and WhatsApp outage and demanding answers.
https://twitter.com/AshishA78103109/status/1372973122173865984?s=20
In case you’re wondering about what the error 5xx actually even means, it is an indication that there is a problem with the server. When you access a website, your browser sends a request to the target website’s server, and no response from it throws out the error.
Nonetheless, details regarding the outage are still not out but we are waiting on any form of official confirmation. Hence, you would want to stay tuned to PiunikaWeb.
And of course, you can continue sticking to alternatives like Twitter, Snapchat, and Telegram until the issue is finally resolved.
Update 1 (March 19)
11:53 pm (IST): The outage lasted for almost an hour but is finally over for both Instagram and WhatsApp. A reason for the issue has still not been given out though.
PiunikaWeb started purely as an investigative tech journalism website with a main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Fox News, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, MacRumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.
