The week has gotten off to a very rocky start for some of the world’s biggest tech giants as three of the world’s largest social media platforms experienced massive global outages, leaving millions of users unable to access many of the features of their accounts.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp websites and smartphone apps first experienced significant outages at around noon Eastern time. Shortly after, #facebookoutage, #instagramdown, and other similar hashtags began trending on Twitter. Facebook employees also reportedly had trouble accessing their workspaces on the company’s back end.
Representatives from the companies have not publicly stated what caused the outages although Facebook did acknowledge them in a Tweet at around 1 pm EST, stating: “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.”
A few hours later, they retweeted a tweet from Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer that made the following acknowledgement: “*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
The outages come a day after Facebook a whistleblower accused Facebook of prioritizing profit over curtailing hate speech and misinformation.
According to Reuters, shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, opened lower after the 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. Additionally, Facebook had also requested earlier today that a federal judge revisit an antitrust complaint that had been made against them by the Federal Trade Commission.
As of 5:45 pm EST, Reuters reported that some features had been restored for some accounts.
