Update: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram began slowly returning to the internet Monday evening, about six hours after crashing. A tweet from Facebook around 6:30 ET said they were "coming back online now," CNN reports. "Thank you for bearing with us," the tweet said. The restoration was not complete, however; service was inconsistent, the company said, per the New York Times. Our original story follows:
Sunday was a very bad day for Facebook—and Monday isn't looking any better. Facebook and the Facebook-owned platforms Instagram and WhatsApp are experiencing widespread outages, Variety reports. Users worldwide are getting error messages when they try to access the site. The company issued a statement on a platform it doesn't own. "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook tweeted. "We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Facebook did not disclose the cause of the outages, which began around 11:40am Eastern, but security experts suspect a domain name service (DNS) issue is to blame, Gizmodo reports. Facebook's share price is also taking a beating, per the Motley Fool. It sank more than 5% in trading before noon Monday. On Sunday night, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed her identity. The data scientist, who leaked internal Facebook research to the Wall Street Journal, told 60 Minutes that there were clear "conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook," and Facebook is "substantially worse" in this regard than other social networks. (More Facebook stories.)
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