Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are coming back after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says.
All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or on smartphone apps.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it was the largest failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports around the world.
The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2019.
Facebook tweeted its apologies to those affected by 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 apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
The social media giant’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said it may take some time for Facebook’s services to “get to 100%”.
Some people also reported problems using Facebook’s virtual reality headset platform, Oculus, and apps which require Facebook logins were affected, including Pokémon Go.
An outage of this scale for such a long time is rare. The disruption in 2019 left Facebook and its other apps mostly inaccessible across the world for more than 14 hours.
As yet there has been no official reason given for the problem. But online network experts speculated it may involve an error with DNS, or the domain name system, for Facebook sites.
Source: BBC
