After Facebook-owned apps WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, and Instagram experienced outages on Friday evening across the globe; many users — who couldn’t seem to wait to re-establish a connection with their friends and loved ones — rushed to register on Signal.
Taking to Twitter, messaging app Signal welcomed all new users and announced that registration on the app
“went through the roof” because of WhatsApp’s outage.
“Solidarity to the folks working on the WhatsApp outage.
Signal registrations are through the roof; welcome everyone! Solidarity to the folks working on the WhatsApp outage. People outside of the tech industry will never understand how weird it sounds when someone says that they are “looking forward to some weekend downtime.
— Signal (@signalapp) March 19, 2021
People outside of the tech industry will never understand how weird it sounds when someone says that they are ‘looking forward to some weekend downtime’.”
According to Down Detector, a website that monitors app crashes in real-time from around the world;
User reports indicate Whatsapp is having problems since 1:34 PM EDT. https://t.co/cvGsWTfsWq RT if you’re also having problems #Whatsappdown
— Downdetector (@downdetector) March 19, 2021
“user reports indicate[d] Whatsapp was having problems since 1:34 PM EDT,” it wrote on Twitter Friday.
Instagram outage reports, however, shot up from 34 at 10:12 pm to a whopping 106,729, as of 10:42 pm, as per Down Detector.
The real-time monitoring service indicated that while 788 WhatsApp users had sent crash reports; as of 10:15 pm, the number had crossed 24,100 in 15 minutes.
Similarly, reports about Facebook’s Messenger rose from 818; as of 10:17 pm, to more than 5,600 in less than 15 minutes.
The writer is Freelancer, associated with Medical Profession ,working towards PhD in Healthcare Management.