Facebook ruled out a cyber-attack on its products WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, which suffered service outage for hours on Wednesday.
Users across the globe experienced problems sending messages on Facebook's messaging apps Messenger and WhatsApp. The social networking giant's image-sharing website Instagram also suffered service disruptions.
After users reported about the inconvenience faced by them on the websites and mobile apps, Facebook took to Twitter to respond, "We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."
The tech major confirmed that the problem was not related to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyber attack.
"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack," Facebook informed the users, who believed the service disruption could be a "cyber-attack".
Although the users could open Facebook and Instagram mobile apps, they experienced troubles uploading posts, say reports.
Internet users made their way to Twitter to complain about the hours-long service disruption with hashtags such as "#FacebookDown", "#InstagramDown" and "#WhatsApp".
Meanwhile, the social media outage became the butt of jokes on Twitter. Several Facebook users took to the micro-blogging website to tickle their funny bone with satirical comments, jokes and memes.
Gmail too, suffered an outage on Wednesday with several Google users reporting problems with accessing Gmail and other services in large parts of the world. The company said it was investigating the problem.
Many users in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia reported outages with Gmail, Google Maps and Google Drive, The Guardian reported.
In a statement, Google said it was investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. "We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behaviour," the company posted on its service website.