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

Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.



Kolkata (PTI): Flight services between Kolkata and Dubai resumed partially on Thursday, after a four-day suspension due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, officials said.

A flydubai aircraft from Dubai landed at the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport here at 2:40 am with 130 passengers on board, marking the first arrival from the Middle East after services were halted for over 113 hours, they said.

The Boeing 737 Max aircraft was scheduled to arrive at 12:25 am, Kolkata airport officials said.

ALSO READ:  Resolution for his removal: Speaker Birla to be present in House but not chair proceedings

The same aircraft departed for Dubai at 3:59 am with 55 passengers, they said.

The last flight to depart for the Middle East from Kolkata before the suspension was an Emirates aircraft to Dubai on February 28, the officials said.

International services between Kolkata and cities such as Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi were disrupted, after airlines temporarily suspended operations amid escalating tensions and airspace restrictions in parts of the Middle East, due to the conflict involving the US, Israel and Iran.

There is no clear indication about when all the Middle East routes will fully reopen, they said.