Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram face global outage: Check details here

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, collectively called the Facebook family of apps, were down globally for users on Monday evening. As usual, many users turned to Twitter to talk about the outage. 

“WhatsApp”, and “#facebookdown”, “#whatsappdown” and “#instagramdown” were trending on Twitter on Monday evening in India. The microblogging platform was abuzz with memes, tweets, and questions about the outage. “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 apologise for any inconvenience,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement. 

Facebook has over 328 million users in India, WhatsApp has over 400 million. An estimate by Statista says India has over 180 million users on Instagram.

“*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now.  We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible,“ tweeted Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer late Monday night. 

Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram are facing the outage due to a DNS issue, many Twitter users have reported. 

The Domain Name System (DNS) helps organise the Internet with the allotment of domains like “.com,” “.net,” and so on.

Users on Twitter reported that the DNS entries for Facebook and its family of apps appear to have vanished from the Internet.

This also led websites and services that have Facebook profile-based logins to be down across the Internet.

Reuters said security researchers thought the “outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible”.

The outage has also affected Facebook’s Workplace, which its enterprise customers use, and is also its internal collaboration platform. Many Twitter users also said Facebook employees are unable to login to their emails and other work related platforms.

The company has not said anything beyond its official statement so far.

Facebook’s stock fell as much as 6 per cent on the Nasdaq.