WhatsApp down: Facebook-owned apps experience major global crash

Update: 11:44pm: WhatsApp says "we are back" and thanks loyal users for patience.

Update 11:42pm: Facebook's Gaming unit says "multiple teams are working" to fix the global outage in the company's products.

Update 11:20pm: Some Whatsapp users say they are able to again send messages on the app shortly after 11pm.

KARACHI: Facebook-owned apps — including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram — are experiencing a major global crash, user reports and real-time monitors confirmed late Friday.

Users around the world reported that all Facebook apps — WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram — were experiencing outages. The social media giant did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters said.

However, Facebook's gaming unit said on Twitter that there were "a number of issues currently affecting" the social media giant's products but that "multiple teams are working on it".

"We'll update you when we can," it added.

WhatsApp announced a few minutes before midnight that it was "back", thanking users for their patience.

Down Detector, a website that monitors app crashes in real-time from around the world, showed more than 4,000 users reporting problems with WhatsApp from around the world.

"User reports indicate Whatsapp is having problems since 1:34 PM EDT," it wrote on Twitter Friday.

WABetaInfo, a website that independently tracks and announces news about WhatsApp for iOS, Android, and Windows, also confirmed that the app was "experiencing outages".

Instagram outage reports, however, shot up from 34 at 10:12pm to a whopping 106,729, as of 10:42pm, as per Down Detector.

The real-time monitoring service indicated that while 788 WhatsApp users had sent crash reports, as of 10:15pm, the number had crossed 24,100 in 15 minutes.

Similarly, reports about Facebook's Messenger rose from 818, as of 10:17pm, to more than 5,600 in less than 15 minutes.