Worldwide wallop to Facebook app family

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, three of the most-popular websites and apps in the world, were knocked offline Monday in a major internet outage.

The snafu that affected the products, all owned and operated by Facebook, occurred around noon. Several other Facebook products were affected as well.

On Facebook, a simple error message read, “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

According to technology site The Verge, the issue appeared to be a DNS (server) problem.

“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,” Facebook communications exec Andy Stone said on Twitter.

As of Monday evening, Facebook and Instagram had begun reloading for some users, but WhatsApp remained offline.

According to screenshots shared on social media during the outage, the URL for Facebook.com appeared as for sale on GoDaddy.com and other domain-sales websites.

The outage came at a bad time for Facebook. On Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes,” a former employee who had previously leaked thousands of the company’s internal documents spoke publicly for the first time, detailing many harmful practices at the websites.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Frances Haugen said. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose …making more money.”

Facebook’s troubles continued into the afternoon when the company’s stock tumbled by 5%, costing CEO Mark Zuckerberg around $7 billion from his $121 billion net worth.