Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are coming back after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says.
All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world.
The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2019.The services went down at about 16:00 GMT with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 22:00.
Facebook tweeted its apologies to those affected by the outage.
The social media giant’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said it may take some time for Facebook’s services to “get to 100%”.
The error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested an error in the Domain Name System (DNS), which 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.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work.
Facebook, which is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in U.S. ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index. (BBC & Reuters)
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. 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.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021