Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Go Down in Worldwide Outage

WASHINGTON (SBG) — Facebook, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, were offline Monday during a worldwide outage, affecting users and employees across the world.

According to the website Down Detector, outages across the three apps spiked by tens of thousands in less than an hour. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tweeted it feels like a “snow day,” regarding the internal failures.

Via Twitter, Facebook said in a statement the company said they were aware “some people” were experiencing issues. The social media platform did not offer a timeline of when the site would be restored but said they were “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”

Instagram and WhatsApp had similar tweets.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc., said it appears the routes Facebook advertises online that tell the entire internet how to reach its properties are not available.

Madory said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn. The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed. DNS translates an address like “facebook.com” to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook’s DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.

The outage started around 11:45 a.m. EDT but the company has not said what may have caused the sites to go dark. While website and app outages are normal, one on this large of a scale is rare. Users from California to New York – even reaching all the way to Europe – reported being unable to access the sites.

Facebook is going through a separate major crisis after a whistleblower named Frances Haugen went public on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. Haugen was the source of The Wall Street Journal’s series of stories exposing the company’s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions.

The WSJ’s stories painted the picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests instead of the public good.

Haugen was identified in the interview as the person who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls’ mental health.

Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”