Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage

A massive global outage plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services — including Facebook’s own workforce — into chaos Monday.

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. and was still unfixed more than six hours later, although scattered users have reported partial restoration of one service or another. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.

For hours, Facebook’s only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and that it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s outgoing chief technology officer, later tweeted “sincere apologies“to everyone impacted by the outage. He blamed “networking issues” and said teams are “working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.“

There was no evidence as of Monday afternoon that malicious activity was involved. Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.” Prince said the most likely explanation was that Facebook mistakenly knocked itself off the internet during maintenance.