It was not less than six hours after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down, service started coming back after the issue has been rectified.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered outages midday Monday, according to public statements from the three media platforms .
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said on Twitter.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Outage tracking site Down Detector logged tens of thousands of reports for each of the services. Facebook’s own site would not load at all for about an hour on Monday; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but could not load new content or send messages.
The reason for the outage was not immediately clear. However, multiple security experts quickly pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem as a possible culprit. Around 1 pm ET, Cisco’s internet analysis division ThousandEyes said on Twitter that its tests indicate the outage is due to an ongoing DNS failure. The DNS translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer. It’s often called the “phonebook of the internet.”
More than four hours after the outage started, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted:”We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Facebook tweeted just after 6:30 pm ET that its apps and services were beginning to work again.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,”
“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
“I don’t know If I’ve seen an outage like this before from a major internet firm,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring firm Kentik.