Three Facebook-owned platforms are down after a worldwide outage.
Facebook, Instagram, and the popular messaging app WhatsApp are all out of service for tens of thousands of users, according to Downdetector.com.
In a statement on Twitter, the social media giant said, “We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products."
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” the company added.
Instagram and WhatsApp also confirmed issues on their Twitter pages.
All three platforms operate on a common infrastructure.
“Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram,” reports Reuters. “The outage might be affecting a larger number of users. Meanwhile, the social-media giant's instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.”
An error on Facebook “suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July,” per NDTV.
Facebook was temporarily out of service in both March and July due to large-scale outages.
According to CNN, "The outage came the morning after '60 Minutes' aired a segment in which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed the company is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that Facebook has tried to hide that evidence. Facebook has pushed back on those claims."
News of the outages prompted a plethora of reactions on Twitter.
The official cause of the outages has not yet been publicly announced.
