SINGAPORE — Social media users worldwide may have gone cold turkey momentarily after Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger ran into technical issues early on Thursday morning (March 14), but it was mainly business as usual for Singaporeans despite the inconvenience.

The cause of the interruption has not yet been made public and services on Instagram and WhatsApp were restored around noon on Thursday.

Social media giant Facebook said earlier on Twitter that it was working on resolving the technical issues. There have been no further updates since.

Downdetector, a website for reporting problems on applications and websites, said that the issues ranged from users having trouble logging into accounts to being unable to post comments or photos.

Despite these technical problems, several business owners and professionals who rely on the social media applications told TODAY that they experienced minimal impact to their operations.

An associate digital account manager, who requested to be identified only as Samantha, said her social media agency faced “intermittent issues” accessing the various social media platforms in the morning, but the level of disruption was either low or manageable.

The firm, whose clients include government agencies, insurance companies and retail outlets, typically schedules social media posts late in the evening.

Nevertheless, the 31-year-old said emails were sent out to notify their clients to “manage their expectations”.

Ms Melissa Lam, who uses Instagram daily to communicate with customers and publish posts on her bamboo-related products or work-related activities, said she was fortunate as she was busy packing her wares in the morning.

“If the outage had lasted longer than a few hours, it would have been an issue,” said the 27-year-old.

Engineer Claire Gwee, 33, who relies on WhatsApp for day-to-day work coordination, said the outage in the morning caused inconvenience and frustration.

She was unable to send out or receive photos and videos related to her projects as a result of the outage.

“Thankfully, there was no problem with sending out normal messages, so at least communication channels were not completely down,” she added.

Others like Mr Keith Tay, manager of fast fashion brand MGP Label, were not as lucky. On top of its regular posts on Instagram and Facebook, the e-commerce firm had planned to run a contest giveaway but that was scuttled by the outage.

The drop in engagement with potential customers and wasted advertising costs resulted in some loss of income for the company, added Mr Tay.

While some saw their businesses affected by the most severe outage in Facebook’s history, others were mainly indifferent to a temporary blip in their social media lives.

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150 million users — compared to around 2.3 billion monthly users it has today.

Local blogger Lee Kin Mun, who is popularly known online as “mrbrown”, said he was asleep for most of the outage.

“When I found out Facebook and Instagram were down, I started to SMS all my fans with emojis of what I had for lunch,” said the 49-year-old.

He added that he was fortunate that he does not just rely on Facebook’s trio of applications to engage with his followers, which was a sentiment shared by some others.

Freelance copywriter Chan Gent Ho said that he usually chats on messaging platform Telegram and uses WhatsApp only for family members who are overseas.

“Interestingly, it’s quite enlightening today that my friends and I haven’t actually been bothered at all by the outage,” said the 33-year-old.

For football fan Manoj Prabhoda, the outage was a missed opportunity for him to celebrate Liverpool’s 3-1 Champions League round of 16 victory over Bayern Munich on Thursday morning.

“Liverpool won and I was trying to send some memes related to the game to my friends via WhatsApp... I was left looking at a spinning wheel,” said the 33-year-old television director.