Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, three of the most-popular websites and apps in the world, were knocked offline Monday in a major internet outage.
The outage that affected the products, which are all owned and operated by Facebook, occurred around noon EST [1600 GMT]. Several other products that are owned and run by Facebook were also affected.
On Facebook, a simple error message read "Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can."
According to The Verge, the issue appears to be a DNS (server) problem.
"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, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook communications exec Andy Stone said on Twitter.
According to screenshots shared on social media, the URL for Facebook.com appeared as for sale on GoDaddy.com and other domain-buying websites.
Harmful practices
The outage comes at an inopportune time for Facebook. On Sunday’s episode of "60 Minutes," a former employee who had previously leaked thousands of the company’s internal documents spoke publicly for the first time, detailing many harmful practices at the websites.
"The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook," Frances Haugen said. "And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money."
Among the most-shocking of Haugen’s accusations is that Facebook is actively promoting the spread of misinformation related to a number of hot-button issues on its platform.
Facebook’s rough start to the week continued into the afternoon when the company’s stock tumbled by 5 per cent, which actually cost CEO Mark Zuckerberg an estimated 7 billion dollars from his estimated 121-billion-dollar net worth.
