Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage on Monday, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.
Outage tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington and Paris, with problems being reported from around 1545 GMT.
Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter.
Stocks in Facebook plummeted almost 5% following Monday’s outage aligned with an expose into the social media giant’s operations.
Former employee Frances Haugen appeared on Sunday night television show “60 minutes” and revealed that she had been the source of internal documents and research showing the company knew of the harmful effects caused by its platforms.
The data scientist said the company in its present form fuels hate, unrest and misinformation, and said that the organization knew about these issues, but did not act on them.
Shortly after the partial return of Facebook and Instagram, Whatsapp also appeared to be back in service.
The platform apologized to users and said: “We’re slowly and carefully getting WhatsApp working again.”
Social media apps Facebook and Instagram appear to have been partially reconnected after major disruptions to the popular online platforms were reported in a global outage on Monday.
Facebook Engineering tweeted that its apps and services were coming back online and took the opportunity to apologize to users.
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have also been impacted and still appear to be out of service.
The outage tracking site, Downdetector said it had received almost 14 million reported disruptions in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, India and several other countries.
Earlier the New York Times reported that Facebook had deployed a team — at its data center in California — to carry out a “manual reset” of the servers.
The platforms appeared to go down around 1545 GMT, prompting a flurry of error reports.
In a message on Twitter, Facebook acknowledged the outage, saying “we’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
WhatsApp and Instagram issued similar messages on Twitter, with the latter writing that the service is “having a little bit of a hard time right now” and asking for patience.
Users also flagged disruptions with providers Vodafone, T-Mobile and Verizon in the UK, Italy, the US, Germany and other countries, according to Downdetector.
The issues appear to primarily impact internet use on cell phones or in gaming apps and other sites where Facebook is used to log-in. The ability to make phone calls or send text messages was not impacted.
Many social media users — and companies — turned to Twitter for information and to log issues, which the social media site taking it in stride by writing the message: “hello literally everyone.”
WhatsApp responded with a “hello” of its own, prompting Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to also jump in on the exchange.
“Thought this was supposed to be encrypted…” he wrote, poking fun at the Facebook-owned app’s encrypted messaging service.
An official reason for the disruption has not yet been given — nor an idea about when the platforms would be up and running again.
Several tech experts, however, believe a DNS (domain name system) issue could be behind the crash, reported news agency DPA. The system converts website names typed out with letters into IP addresses that computers can process.
John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer of the cloud service Cloudflare, said that continued attempts by users to access the site have also led to overloading on DNS services. – DW.
