After a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp were back up late Monday afternoon Eastern time.
The greatest failure ever logged by web monitoring organization Downdetector was caused by Facebook, which apologized but did not immediately explain what caused it.
The outage was the business’s second setback in as many days, following a whistleblower’s accusation on Sunday that the corporation has consistently prioritized profit before cracking down on hate speech and misinformation.
As users flocked to competing apps like Twitter and TikTok, Facebook’s stock dropped 4.9 percent on Monday, its worst daily drop since November, as part of a broader selloff in technology firms. Following the reinstatement of service, shares increased approximately half a percent in after-hours trading.
“I sorry to every little and large business, family, and the individual who relies on us,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said, adding that “it may take some time to get to 100%.”
Several Facebook employees who did not want to be identified said the outage was caused by an internal error in how internet traffic is routed to the company’s systems. Employees claimed that failures of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on the same network to function aggravated the problem.
