Facebook (FB), Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered outages midday Monday, according to public statements from the three Facebook services.
"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook said on Twitter. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Outage tracking site Down Detector logged tens of thousands of reports for each of the services. Facebook's own site would not load at all for about an hour on Monday; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but could not load new content or send messages.
The reason for the outage was not immediately clear. However, multiple security experts quickly pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem as a possible culprit. Around 1 pm ET, Cisco's internet analysis division ThousandEyes said on Twitter that its tests indicate the outage is due to an ongoing DNS failure. The DNS translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer. It's often called the "phonebook of the internet."
More than four hours after the outage started, Facebook CTO Mark Schroepfer tweeted: "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."
A spokesperson for the company did not respond to a request for comment from CNN Business.
"I don't know If I've seen an outage like this before from a major internet firm," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring firm Kentik.
For a lot of people, Madory told CNN, "Facebook is the internet to them."
In other news, Market Report Says,"Facebook Inc. services experienced widespread outages Monday morning, adding to the social network’s miserable day.
Facebook FB, -4.89% shares experienced their worst session in nearly a year, falling 4.9% to $326.23 for their worst single-day percentage decline since a 5% fall on Nov. 9, 2020. The stock outpaced a 1.3% loss on the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.30% and a 2.1% loss on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index. COMP, - 2.14%
The decline followed a national broadcast of a whistleblower’s allegations that the social media network placed profits before safety. Late Sunday, ViacomCBS Inc.’s VIAC, -1.98% news program “60 Minutes” aired an interview with former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, who alleges that the social-media giant has been deceiving investors about how it has been dealing with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.
CNN Reports: Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation!
Her name is Frances Haugen. That is a fact that Facebook has been anxious to know since last month when an anonymous former employee filed complaints with federal law enforcement. The complaints say Facebook's own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest—but the company hides what it knows. One complaint alleges that Facebook's Instagram harms teenage girls. What makes Haugen's complaints unprecedented is the trove of private Facebook research she took when she quit in May. The documents appeared first, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. But tonight, Frances Haugen is revealing her identity to explain why she became the Facebook whistleblower.
Frances Haugen: 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. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.
Frances Haugen is 37, a data scientist from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a Harvard master's degree in business. For 15 years she's worked for companies including Google and Pinterest.
Frances Haugen: I've seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I'd seen before.
Scott Pelley: You know, someone else might have just quit and moved on. And I wonder why you take this stand.
Frances Haugen: Imagine you know what's going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.
Scott Pelley: When and how did it occur to you to take all of these documents out of the company?
Frances Haugen: At some point in 2021, I realized, "Okay, I'm gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real."
Learn More at https://cbsn.ws/3a77U56
"We have evidence Facebook padded user numbers for higher revenue Says Whistleblower attorney"
Facebook whistleblower's attorney Andrew Bakaj joins 'Closing Bell' to discuss why he believes Facebook is engaged in fraudulent activity, why they decided to file complaints with the SEC and how Facebook can move forward productively.
We just could resist not sharing some of the #FacebookDown #Memes
Update as of 4:20pm PST <Facebook is back up>
Thanks for reading!
Mr Blue