Millions forced offline in social media meltdown

MAJOR social media services, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, were hit by a massive outage on Tuesday, impacting potentially tens of millions of users including in Australia.

People could not load the Facebook website, send or receive messages on WhatsApp or refresh their feed on Instagram from about 2.45am.

Downdetector, where the public can report website outages, said that it had received 5.6 million reports about issues with Facebook’s services.

Facebook’s internal communications platform, Workplace, also went down, leaving many employees unable to work, as did the company’s virtual reality platform, Oculus.

Facebook did not say what had caused the outage, but experts said it was likely to have been an issue with the domain name system. Facebook and Instagram were back up and running by 9am Tasmanian time but users reported the pages were “glitchy”.

The outage comes a day after a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, went on US television after she leaked a trove of documents to authorities alleging the social media giant knew its products were fuelling hate and harming children’s mental health. The data scientist worked for companies, including Google and Pinterest, but said Facebook was “substantially worse”.