Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down worldwide
New Delhi: Facebook and Instagram are both inaccessible, with news feeds refusing to refresh and the main Facebook.com domain unavailable, while WhatsApp messages aren’t being sent or received, The Verge reported on Sunday.
According to traffic-monitoring website DownDetector, Facebook was the first to encounter problems at around 3:28pm [PST], followed by Instagram at 3:33pm and WhatsApp at 3:58pm.
Facebook Inc, which owns and operates all three services, has yet to comment on the disruption. The outage appeared to be affecting both websites and apps.
People took to Twitter to report the outages, with #WhatsAppDown, #InstagramDown and #FacebookDown trending in Pakistan and across the globe.
The outage comes exactly a month after Facebook went down for almost a full day across parts of North America and Europe on March 14. At the time, the social network had said that the outages, which affected users and advertisers worldwide, resulted from a “server configuration change”, AP had reported.
Some media outlets had branded the outage — which also affected Instagram as well as Messenger — as the biggest in Facebook's history.
Sunday's outage is yet another publicity problem for a company already dealing with privacy issues and regulatory probes.
Regulators, investigators and elected officials in the US and elsewhere in the world have already been digging into the data sharing practices of Facebook, which has more than two billion users.
The social network's handling of user data has been a flashpoint for controversy since it admitted last year that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy which did work for Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign, used an app that may have hijacked the private details of 87 million users.
Courtesy: www.dawn.com
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Three arrested in Gurugram for aiding Chinese cyber fraud syndicate
Gurugram (PTI): The Gurugram Cyber Police has arrested three men for allegedly providing calling support to a Chinese fraud syndicate, officials said on Wednesday.
According to the officials, a 20-port physical SIM box and a laptop were seized from them. These arrests come after a woman from Nagaland was held in connection with the same case.
The arrested accused have been identified as Karma (32) from Nagaland, and Lobsang Tsultim (33) and Ngawang Gyaltsen (35), both from Himachal Pradesh. Karma and Tsultim were arrested on February 14. Gyaltsen was intercepted on February 16 near Majnu Ka Tila in Delhi while attempting to flee to Nepal.
Police said the accused, during questioning, revealed that they were using SIM boxes to facilitate fraudulent calls targeting Indian citizens.
Karma and Lobsang Tsultim admitted to installing virtual SIM boxes in Gurugram on the instructions of a Chinese national named Tsega, they said.
These setups, which included 20 mobile phones, were capable of making over 20,000 calls a day. Tsega, allegedly used an application to contact Indian citizens for various crimes, including gaming and investment fraud, they said.
Tsultim and Gyaltsen were born in China and have lived in India as refugees for 15 years. Fluent in Chinese and Taiwanese, they communicated with Tsega via WeChat, a platform banned in India since 2020, they added.
ACP Cyber Priyanshu Dewan said the three accused were produced in court on Wednesday and have been sent to judicial custody.
"We are working to identify others involved in the network," he added.
