New Delhi:

As all Facebook services suffered a brief outage around the world, WhatsApp’s rival Signal jumped in to “welcome everyone”.

In a tweet, the cross-platform messaging app said: “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.”

On Friday night, many users of the Facebook services – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – had posted on Twitter about not being able to log into any of these social media platforms or open the sites for almost an hour.

According to website outage tracker Downdetector, the problems started to be noticed by users at around 10.30 pm on Friday, March 19 – as of 11.30pm IST they started to be functional again.

In January, Signal had faced a series of outages globally as users flocked to the newly-launched app following WhatsApp changing its privacy policy, which required WhatsApp users to share their data with both Facebook and Instagram.

The non-profit Signal Foundation based in Silicon Valley, which currently oversees the app, was launched in February 2018 with Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook, providing initial funding of $50 million.