Two members of its security team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said it was unlikely that a cyberattack had taken place because one hack was unlikely to affect so many apps at once. Several hours into the incident, Facebook’s security experts were still trying to identify the root issue, according to an internal memo and employees briefed on the matter. This time, the cause of the outage remained unclear. Facebook’s last significant outage was in 2019, when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours, in a reminder that even the most powerful internet companies can still be crippled by a snafu. Technology outages are not uncommon, but to have so many apps go dark from the world’s largest social media company at the same time was highly unusual.

As of noon on Monday, Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, had more than 80,000 reports of Facebook being down, over 60,000. Hours later, the sites were still not functioning, according to Downdetector, which monitors web traffic and site activity. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Within five minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went down at the same time on Monday, taking out a vital communications platform used by more than three billion people around the world and adding heat to a company already under intense scrutiny.įacebook’s apps - which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Oculus - began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m.

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