Chennai: Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users were able to access the social-media platforms partially nearly six hours after they went down late on Monday night as a suspected global outage and technical failure disrupted their services.
Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark around 9 pm Monday. The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement, ‘We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.’
‘The Facebook outage has become the largest outage we’ve ever seen on Downdetector with over 10.6 million outage reports all over the globe,’ Downdetector said in a post.
The maximum number of outages were reported in the United States with over 1.7 million outage reports, followed by Germany at 1.3 million outage reports and the Netherlands at 915,000 outage reports. The outage left all services under Facebook’s umbrella including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and even Oculus non-functional for several hours.
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, amid a broader sell off in technology stocks.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work.