Millions forced offline in Facebook IT outage

MAJOR social media services, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, were hit by a massive outage early on Tuesday morning, 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. That system ensures users are taken to the right site when they put an address into their browser. Problems with it mean that when a user types “facebook.com”, the internet does not know where to find it.

Facebook and Instagram were back up and running by 9am Tuesday in Australia.