Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are once again accessible after suffering their worst outage since 2008.
The social media sites were each offline for more than six hours on Monday (October 4) due to a major outage. However, some of the services are not yet fully functioning, with some users still reporting problems posting new content to Instagram.
Facebook has not disclosed what went wrong. All three platforms stopped working shortly before noon Monday when the websites and apps for Facebook’s services were responding with server errors.
The outage marked the longest stretch of downtime for Facebook since 2008, when a bug knocked the site offline for about a day, affecting about 80 million users. The platform currently has three billion users worldwide.
In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook blamed a server configuration change for that outage.
The latest outage came a day after a whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealed herself ahead of an interview with "60 Minutes."
The documents, first reported in a series of Wall Street Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other misdeeds.
Facebook shares closed down almost 5% on Monday at $326.23. The company’s stock is up 21% year-to-date.
