Facebook Inc users around the world reported they were unable to access its family of social-media apps, including the main social network, photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
Some internal services used by Facebook employees, including the company\u2019s Workplace tool for communicating among teams, is also down for some employees, according to a company spokesperson.<\/p>\n
More than 125,000 Facebook users were reporting problems accessing the app at 11:54 a.m. in New York, according to website DownDetector.<\/p>\n
At least 98,000 people reported trouble with Instagram, and about 35,000 said WhatsApp was having issues. Facebook\u2019s network of apps has more than 2.7 billion daily users on average.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,\u201d Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a tweet. \u201cWe\u2019re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.\u201d<\/p>\n
The issue appears to be related to Facebook\u2019s DNS, or domain name system, records. Put simply, DNS converts domain names like \u201cfacebook.com\u201d to the actual internet protocol addresses of the corresponding website. An error in DNS records can make it impossible to connect to a website.<\/p>\n
The cause of the issue is \u201cprobably a bad configuration or code push to the network management system,\u201d said Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook who is now director of Stanford University\u2019s Internet Observatory. \u201cThis isn\u2019t supposed to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s rare for Facebook\u2019s apps to go down for an extended period of time, and even less common for the company\u2019s internal systems to go offline.<\/p>\n
Such an outage has happened before, though, most notably in 2019 when Facebook\u2019s internal apps stopped working following a dispute with Apple Inc, which halted some of the apps\u2019 functionality on the iPhone maker\u2019s platform.<\/p>\n
After a user on Twitter suggested that Instagram should \u201cstay offline forever,\u201d Instagram boss Adam Mosseri jokingly replied, \u201cThem fighting words\u2026 but it does feel like a snow day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s shares dropped 5.6% to $323.89 at 1:35 p.m. They had already been on the decline Monday after a Facebook whistle-blower appeared on news program \u201c60 Minutes\u201d to discuss the company\u2019s internal research about its impact on society.<\/p>\n