Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp social media platforms crashed on Monday morning in what appears to be a massive service outage. It reportedly began a little after 11 a.m. Eastern Time, and Facebook didn’t immediately identify the source of the outage. Visiting Instagram from your web browser loads a “5xx Server Error,” while Facebook itself gives you a “Sorry, something went wrong” message.
Down Detector, a site that collects reports of online outages, showed more than 100,000 people had reported problems with Facebook by noon.
Most of Twitter’s armchair tech troubleshooters seem to have diagnosed the problem as a DNS error, which, as odds go, is a pretty good guess. Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, says they’re working to figure out the problem.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021
Fast Company reached out to Facebook as well, and will update when information becomes available.
You could say it’s been a tough 24 hours for Mark Zuckerberg and company. Last night, Frances Haugen—the main whistleblower behind the Wall Street Journal‘s Facebook Files series—appeared on 60 Minutes, talking for the first time out in the open about the tech giant’s controversial business decisions. She says she came forward after repeatedly encountering “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook.”
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