Kharagpur: Global outages reported in social apps of Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook got a political twist on Saturday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi used it as an analogy to blame Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s opposition parties in poll-bound West Bengal.
Modi was addressing a public gathering in Kharagpur, West Bengal, where he noted: “Last night, for 50-55 minutes, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were down that left everyone worried!”
Comparing the brief downtime with the slow pace of development in the state, Modi said: “Here in Bengal, development, belief, dreams have been down for 50-55 years, and thus, I understand your impatience to bring in a change,” he added.
On Friday evening, services of social media sites WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were down for over thirty minutes. According to DownDetector, a site that tracks outages, the technical glitch took place at around 11 pm.
Reaching out to the state’s youth in the rally, Modi targeted Mamata Banerjee saying that ‘Didi’ wasted ten very crucial years of Bengal youth. “Her party is the school of cruelty, and its syllabus is Tolabaji, cut-money, syndicate and is a training centre for harassing and troubling people,” he said.
Elections in West Bengal will take place in eight phases, starting March 27.