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WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook are experiencing a malfunction, which started just before 6 p.m. The apps, which are all owned by Facebook, share the same infrastructure. At around midnight, the breakdown seemed to be partially gone.
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The WhatsApp and Instagram app looked ostensibly normal on Monday night, but users were unable to post messages or photos. Anyone who surfed to Facebook got an error message. According to specialized websites, millions of people worldwide were affected.
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Through their Twitter account, Facebook and WhatsApp confirmed that there are problems. It’s not clear what exactly happened.
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The reason for the breakdown was not known Monday evening, but the DNS systems appeared to be the cause, indicating internal problems. DNS is also known as the ‘address book’ of the Internet. Around midnight our time, Instagram and Facebook were available again. WhatsApp, however, remained unreachable.
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Billions of users
Facebook outages are rare, but they have a big impact because they block four of the most used apps in the world. Facebook has 2.8 billion monthly active users worldwide, Messenger more than 1.3 billion, WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users and Instagram 1 billion.
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Anyway, the breakdown came at an inopportune time for Facebook. The social network is under fire after an employee leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents. According to the employee, Frances Haugen, the company does too little to prevent disinformation, hatred and violence on the platform.
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Twitter, the social network that was still available on Monday, poked at the other apps with a joke: “Hello, literally everyone,” it tweeted.
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