After a nearly six-hour outage, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have reconnected
Late Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were at least partially reconnected to the global internet.
Afternoon Eastern time, nearly six hours into a six-hour outage that had rendered the social media platform inoperable.
At around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT), Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark, in what website monitoring group Downdetector described as the largest such failure it had ever seen.
The outage was the social media giant’s second setback in as many days, following a whistleblower’s accusation on Sunday that the company had repeatedly prioritised profit over cracking down on hate speech and misinformation.
“I’m sorry to every small and large business, family, and individual who relies on us,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get back to 100 percent.”
“Facebook shares fell 4.9 percent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks.” Following the resumption of service, shares gained about half a percent in after-hours trading.
Security experts believe the disruption was caused by an internal error, though sabotage by an insider is theoretically possible.
Soon after the outage began, Facebook acknowledged that users were having difficulty accessing its apps, but did not provide any details about the nature of the problem or how many users were affected.
The error message on Facebook’s website suggested a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows web addresses to direct users to their desired destinations. In July, a similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc knocked out multiple websites.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be identified said they believed the outage was caused by an internal routing error to an internet domain, which was exacerbated by failures of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on that same domain to function.
According to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index, Facebook, the world’s second largest digital advertising platform, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage.
Frances Haugen, a product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, revealed on Sunday that she was the whistleblower who provided documents underlying a Wall.
A Wall Street Journal investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram’s harm to adolescent girls are underway.
According to prepared testimony seen by Reuters, Haugen was scheduled to urge the US Congress on Tuesday to regulate the company, which she plans to compare to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking was harmful to health.
