Snapchat Is Not Shutting Down, But It Suffered An Outage Yesterday

Snapchat was down worldwide for at least four hours on Monday and it sparked a rumor that the photo and video sharing service was shutting down. The outage was also ill-timed as the company is preparing to post its quarterly earnings report this Tuesday.

Snapchat stopped working yesterday and users reported that they were simply unable to connect to the server. Snapchat’s Twitter Support page acknowledged the outage and immediately told users that they were looking into it. Snapchat Support also told users to stay logged into their accounts.

For many users, the outage lasted for around four hours, according to Heavy.com. Some of Snapchat’s 173 million daily users worldwide flooded its Twitter Support page with complaints expressing frustration over the the downed service. Snapchat was eventually able to fix the technical issue but didn’t say what caused it in the first place. Snapchat also didn’t say the scope and size of the outage so it’s really impossible to tell exactly how many users were affected by the outage. It’s very likely that thousands were unable to use Snapchat during the technical glitch.

With Snapchat being down for several hours, it spawned a rumor that the photo and video sharing service was shutting down. An article published by Channel45News.com claimed that Snapchat would be shutting down by the end of 2017. The article was short and concise stating that Snapchat will be removed from all app stores on Nov. 14, 2017. The story seems believable, but it’s completely false. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop numerous users from sharing the article all over social media.

“The CEO Evan Spiegel of the very popular app Snapchat has released that Snapchat will be removed from all app stores by November 14,2017. According to Fox News Media Evan has decided to make this decision due to copyright and legal issues with Facebook, Instagram, and Musical.ly. By the date November 14,2017 all Snapchat apps with be removed from all devices and all app stores. DISCLAIMER all data and media associated with the app will also be deleted within the app.”

Snopes debunked the article and pointed out that Channel45News.com is a prank news generator. It’s actually one of a group of sites that allows users to create fake news stories to prank friends and others. Users are only made aware that it’s a prank once they’ve clicked on an article. Unfortunately, it seems as though plenty of users shared the article without even opening the link.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel retuned to Twitter to dismiss the article as “fake news.” The Snapchat Support Twitter page also shared the Snopes article and told users that it wasn’t shutting down. Snapchat being down isn’t really uncommon. The service suffered at least a couple of technical issues just last month, as pointed out by Fortune.

The timing of the technical issue is unfortunate considering that Snapchat is expected to post its third quarter earnings later today. Snap is expected to report a loss of $0.31 per share, but there’s no estimate for revenue, as reported by Forbes.