Facebook activates Safety Check after earthquake hits north east India

Following a powerful earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter Scale rocking India's northeastern region, social network Facebook, has activated its safety check tool to help people in the area let friends and family know they were safe.

"A major earthquake just struck northeastern India and we've activated Safety Check to help people in the area let friends and family know they're safe," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote.

"Tremors were also felt in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal. If you appear to be nearby, we will send you a notification to access Safety Check so you can share that you are safe and see that people you care about are safe as well," Zuckerberg posted on Facebook.

The quake with its epicentre in Manipur's Tamemglong district hit a 4.35 am and according to initial reports one young girl was killed and 30 people were injured.

"My thoughts are with everyone in the affected areas. May you and your loved ones stay safe and healthy," Zuckerberg said.

The feature was last activated for Chennai, during the floods last month caused by torrential rains.

Facebook users in the affected area will get a notification on their Facebook app, clicking on which would send notifications to their Facebook friends.

Meanwhile, an outage hit Facebook-owned popular instant messaging application WhatsApp for a few hours in several parts of the world. Many users had reported issues connecting to WhatsApp on New Year's Eve.

WhatsApp had accepted that there was some technical glitch.

A WhatsApp spokesperson confirming the report said, ''Our messaging service is facing some issues and engineers are working over it to once again provide flawless messaging experience to customers.''

''Some people have had trouble accessing WhatsApp for a short period today. We're working to restore service back to 100% for everyone and we apologise for the inconvenience,'' said a WhatsApp spokesperson.