UPDATED 10/4, 6:00 p.m. ET: Facebook is slowly coming back online around the world after a six-hour outage, The Wrap reports.
Instagram and WhatsApp are also returning after what the Wrap calls “DNS routing problems.”
See original story below.
Facebook and related platforms hit users with the unique joys of a disruption in services on Monday.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led site—as well as the Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp platforms—went down for unknown reasons. And while this doesn’t mark the first time the extended Facebook universe has been infiltrated with outages, the reactions are just as enthusiastic as always.
At the time of this writing, Downdetector showed that reports of Facebook outages spiked at more than 86,000 around 11:42 a.m. ET. Around the same time, Instagram had shown nearly 76,000 outage reports.
Not long after word of the outage started manifesting in jokes and memes, Facebook ironically took to Twitter to confirm they were working on it.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” the official Facebook account on Twitter said. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Worth noting here, though there is currently no indication of a connection, is the fact that—just this past weekend—a Facebook whistleblower identified herself in an in-depth 60 Minutes interview. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, anonymously filed complaints last month revolving around the platform’s alleged “conflicts of interest.”
Speaking with 60 Minutes, Haugen—who will testify before Congress this week—said the “version of Facebook” being used today is “tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence” on a global scale.
Later on Monday, attention started stacking up in the direction of Domain Name System (DNS) concerns. Widely circulating was a screenshot showing a lookup result for Facebook, though there was no consensus on what this could end up meaning on a larger scale.
Meanwhile, NBC News reporter Kevin Collier noted that “pretty much everything” connected with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp was currently inaccessible. There have also been multiple reports, including from NYT tech journalist Sheera Frenkel, that Facebook employees were unable to enter company buildings on Monday because their employee badges weren’t working properly.
It’s also been reported that Facebook’s stock is down 5.5 percent today.
Complex has reached out to a Facebook rep for comment. In the meantime, enjoy some reactions—via Twitter, of course—below.
