As Facebook, WhatsApp Went Down Globally, Congress Leaders Claimed Outage Was Modi Govt's Conspiracy

Services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp started coming back online on Tuesday after an outage that lasted almost six hours.

The services went down at about 16:00 GMT with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 22:00.

"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed on Facebook.

According to DownDetector, a website that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 per cent users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22 per cent had problems with the web version.

Taking to Twitter early on Tuesday, WhatsApp said: "Apologies to everyone who hasn't been able to use WhatsApp today. We're starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again. Thank you so much for your patience. We will continue to keep you updated when we have more information to share."

However, in a bizarre string of allegations, Congress leaders and supporters blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Indian government for the outage.

Vinay Kumar Dokania, National Co-Coordinator Congress Social Media, said, “Whatsapp, Facebook r most widely used apps in India. Both #WhatsAppDown & #facebookdown for more than 3hours now, the longest since last time memory serves me. Does one smell a conspiracy by Modi frnd Zuckerberg to prevent the brutal #lakhimpur_farmer_massacre video from going viral?”

Rohan Gupta, Chairman, Social Media Department, Indian National Congress, said, “WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram outage was coincidence or an experiment?”

In a now-deleted tweet, Congress leader Udit Raj said, “It seems FC (facebook), Whatapp & Instagram are deliberately blocked by the govt to contain the movement of Smt Priyanka Gandhi & Opposition and farmers.”

Similarly, UP East Youth Congress wrote, “The video of the murder has emerged. Sahib [PM Modi] has a visit to Lucknow tomorrow. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, everything is closed. Or is it done intentionally? You decide!!”

It should be noted that Facebook said on Tuesday that the major outage of WhatsApp and Instagram along with the parent app Facebook was caused due to configuration changes it made to routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.