Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp appeared to have been coming back after an outage that lasted almost six hours.
The three social media platforms – owned by Mark Zuckerberg — completely stopped working shortly before 5 pm on Monday, leaving millions of users worried.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook had earlier written.
While the cause of the outage was not immediately clear, multiple security experts had blamed a domain name system (DNS) issue as a possible culprit.
But in a tweet a few minutes ago, Facebook apologised to those affected by the outage while also stating that the platforms “are coming back online now”.
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.
—Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” it tweeted.
“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.”
The outage was the second in 2021 with the first happening in March. It also marked the worst outage for the tech giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day.
The net worth of Facebook founder fell by nearly $7 billion in a few hours after the company’s flagship products collapsed.
