Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp partially reconnect after global outage

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp at least partially reconnected to the global internet late Monday afternoon, nearly six hours after a service outage that crippled the social media platform.

Facebook, its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark around 5pm Irish time, in what website monitoring group Downdetector said was the biggest such failure it had ever seen.

Around 9.45pm Irish time, some Facebook users began regaining partial access to the three apps.

The outage was the social media giant’s second blow in several days after a Whistleblowers on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit About cracking down on hate speech and misinformation.

« To every small and large business, family, and individual who counts on us, I’m sorry, » tweeted Mike Schrooper, Facebook’s chief technology officer, adding that it « may take a while to get to 100%. »

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly two billion daily active users, fell 4.9 percent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader sell-off in technology shares.

Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal bug, although sabotage by an insider would theoretically be possible.

« Facebook has basically locked its keys in its car, » tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Shortly after the outage began, Facebook acknowledged that users were having trouble accessing its apps, but did not provide any details about the nature of the problem or say how many users were affected by the outage.

Several Facebook employees, who declined to be named, said they believed the outage was caused by an internal error routing to an Internet domain exacerbated by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on the same domain to function.