Snapchat faces brief outage in India, days after company announces layoffs

Snapchat, one of the world’s most popular instant messaging and media sharing applications was briefly down for Indian users. Users of the platform were not able to send their friends messages and photos, or even upload stories to the platform from their smartphones.

As per outage detection website DownDetector, over 80 per cent of Snapchat users were facing an issue with the platform on Friday, February 9, with thousands of reports complaining of many in-app features not working.

ALSO READ: Instagram now lets you generate backgrounds for stories using AI

This basically points at a platform-wide blackout that had left Snapchat users moving temporarily to other platforms to communicate with peers and share stories. Snapchat is yet to officially acknowledge the outage.

Snapchat outage could be direct result of internal turmoil, layoffs

Interestingly enough, the outage came a day after some major behind-the-scenes developments took place with the platform.

As per a report by Firstpost, Snapchat is expected to lose over USD 9 Billion in market value after the company’s stock fell 31 per cent on Wednesday. This came right after Snapchat fell short of Wall Street’s projections for the fourth straight quarter.

ALSO READ: Snapchat, Instagram to support Galaxy S24’s max camera quality

Earlier this week, Snapchat had also announced that the company would lay off over 500 workers to cut down its workforce by about 10 per cent.

As of writing this story, Snapchat is yet to officially acknowledge the outage in India, but it seems many users who were affected by the issue are beginning to see the app slowly go back to normal. However, it seems we will never know what exactly (briefly) pulled the plug on the app’s Indian servers.