A massive outage on Monday knocked out service to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, taking the sites offline for users across the world.
All three social media giants, owned and operated by Facebook Inc., based in Menlo Park, California, went out of service at 11:39 a.m. Eastern Time.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” a Facebook spokesperson said Monday in a statement to NBC News. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
WhatsApp tweeted: “We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”
And Instagram took to Twitter and posted the hashtag #instagramdown with the message: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! “
One Facebook employee said it appeared to be a Domain Name System problem, the “phone book” of the internet that computers use to look up individual websites.
“I wish I knew. No internal tooling, DNS seems totally borked. Everyone is just sort of standing around,” the source told NBC News. “No reason at this point to suspect anything malicious but the outage is affecting pretty much everything. Can’t even access third-party tools.”
And a WhatsApp employee told NBC News that no internal services at company headquarters worked except for email and calendars.
Even conference rooms were inaccessible during the outage, the employee said, because they’re digitally locked and unlocked through an internet-connected tablet.
The outage comes a day after Facebook faced allegations from a whistleblower that it had turned a blind eye to disinformation that led to the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an episode that aired Sunday night.
A Facebook spokeswoman, responding to the “60 Minutes” report, said the company has made “significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content.”
This is a developing story, please refresh here for updates.
Ezra Kaplan contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
