On Saturday morning, WhatsApp users in the United Arab Emirates observed problems with the messaging service on their desktop and mobile devices. There were glitches with Facebook and Instagram as well as other Meta platforms.
Around 12:10 p.m. WhatsApp services resumed after more than 2 hours of inconsistent connectivity. A few hours later, Facebook and Instagram were back to their normal services after showing glitches for almost 3 hours.
Those signed into WhatsApp Web on the desktop were logged out and were unable to send messages, and just one check mark (in grey) appeared before they were sent instead of the normal two check marks for delivery. After a few minutes, messages began coming through on the app, but the website was still down. The error message that appeared was, “This site is currently unavailable.”.
Downdetector.com, a famous monitoring site, saw a spike in users reporting issues with WhatsApp around 10:47 a.m.
Beginning around 11:11 AM, Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram all saw a spike in activity, which peaked at 11:12 PM. The Facebook and Instagram mobile apps seemed to be operating without issue (although loading times were slower for some users), but desktop browsers were unable to access the sites until about 2:00 p.m.
Multiple users across the UAE have also reported on the Down Detector website that their Etisalat Landline Internet was also down meanwhile WhatsApp and other social media services were not working.
However, there has been no statement yet available from Etisalat and Meta about the outage of the internet and WhatsApp or social media services.
