SAN FRANCISCO, October 4 – Family of Facebook include Instagram and WhatsApp went down for users across the globe, the social media giant said on Monday, as hours later it scrambled to restore the services after being hit by one of its longest outages. The outage began around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT) and service had yet to be restored more than four hours later. On Sunday, a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profitover clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. The firm owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook’s apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Oculus — began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time, users reported. Within five minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. Hours later, the sites were still not functioning, according to Downdetector, which monitors web traffic and site activity.
Shares of Facebook (FB.O), which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, opened lower after the weekend whistleblower report and slipped further to trade down 5.3% in afternoon trading on Monday. They were on track for their worst day in nearly a year, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday. Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. Facebook itself controls the relevant settings, suggesting the problem was an internal one.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc (AKAM.O) took down multiple websites in July. An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique, security experts said.
