Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for users across the globe, the social media giant said on Monday, as it worked on restoring the services after being hit by one of its longest outages.
The three apps – which are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working shortly before 5 pm WAT (12 pm EST). Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.
Why Mark Zuckerberg’s App are Down?
From our findings, we figured that visitors to the Facebook website were only able to see the “This site can’t be reached” error messages on desktop and mobile.
The WhatsApp and Instagram mobile apps continued to load (apparently on cache) but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.
The disruption, which hit Facebook’s platforms minutes before noon, comes a day after a whistleblower accused the firm of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation
Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.
The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues and does not tend to explain to them even after they are fixed. In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.
In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg noted that such outages are a “big deal”. Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, he said and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.
