Facebook, Instagram go offline as Facebook tries to restore services

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline on Monday for users around the globe as it worked to restore the services after one of its longest outages hit it.

The disruption, which hit Facebook's platform minutes before noon, came a day after a whistleblower accused the firm of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, opened lower following the whistleblower report on Saturday and slipped further to trade down 5.3% in afternoon trading on Monday. They were on track for their worst day in nearly a year, amid a wider selloff in tech stocks on Monday.

Incoming Facebook was inaccessible because it was not being referred by the Domain Name System to the correct place. The context of Facebook controls both the relevant settings and buttons.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. In July, a similar outage at the cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc. took multiple websites offline by adding new sites to its list of active customers.

Security experts tracking the situation said the outage was likely triggered by a configuration error that left directions to Facebook servers unavailable. That could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would theoretically be possible.

An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most innovative sites would, on the other hand, require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.

Facebook acknowledged users were having difficulty accessing its apps but did not offer any details about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.

We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience. Facebook tweeted about 30 minutes after the first reporting of the outage.

The response by Facebook was made much harder because customers lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said.

Downdetector - which tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform - shows there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting problems with Facebook and Instagram. The outage could affect a larger number of users.

The social-media giant's Instant Messaging Platform was also down for over 35,000 users, while the Messenger service was down for nearly 9,800 people.

Similar widespread outages with its suite of apps have occurred in March and July this year in Facebook.

Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.

If your game is not running as usual please note that there was an issue with Twitter login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal, Puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Facebook account.