Facebook services are slowly resuming after a six-hour outage on Monday
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.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” it said. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
“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.”
But the fact that a company of Facebook’s size and resources has been offline for over three hours suggests there is no quick fix for the issue.
Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at digital security firm Netscout, said Facebook will likely work to gradually restore service, and that it could take some time for routed information “to be received and propagated worldwide.”
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.
The interview followed weeks of reporting about and criticism of Facebook after Haugen released thousands of pages of internal documents to regulators and the Wall Street Journal. Haugen is set to testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Shares of Facebook were down more than 5% in midday trading Monday, putting it on pace for its worst trading day in nearly a year.