Facebook Outage Left Latin America Dark, Where WhatsApp Dominates

While many people around the world coped with the Facebook and Instagram outage by making lighthearted jokes on Twitter, the incident had more serious consequences for WhatsApp users in Latin America.

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are now back online after millions were unable to access the social media sites or messaging app for several hours on Monday. The company said the issue was down to a faulty configuration change.

While the social media giant and the apps it owns were suffering issues, people on Twitter—which worked fine throughout Monday's outage—noted that WhatsApp not working would overwhelmingly affect people in Latin American countries where it is used by a majority of the population.

According to Global Web Index's 2020 Social Media User Trends Report, 93 percent of those aged 16-64 in Argentina use WhatsApp, as well as 92 percent of Colombians in the same age group, and 91 percent of people in Brazil.