Facebook‘s internal systems used by employees also went down as its
Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook platforms suffered a worldwide outage that has
lasted more than three hours on Monday. Service has not yet been restored.

The company has not commented on the cause of the outage, which began
around 11:40 ET. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and
duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.

According to reports by the Associated Press, not only all the platforms
owned by Facebook are down, but the tech giant’s internal systems used by
employees also went down. The head of Instagram Adam Mosseri termed it as a “snow
day.”.

“This is epic. The last major internet outage, which knocked many
of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The
stricken content delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software
but triggered by a customer who changed a setting,” said Doug Madory, director
of internet analysis for Kentik Inc.

Facebook’s acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook
app” and that it was working on restoring access. 

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted that the company was facing network issues.

The cause of the outage remains unclear. Experts said it appears that
Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the
internet communicate with its properties, AP reported.

Also read: Why is Facebook not working?

Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a key
structure that determines where internet traffic needs to go. DNS translates an
address like “facebook.com” to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If
Facebook’s DNS records disappeared, apps and web addresses would be unable to
locate it.

Facebook is going through a separate major crisis after whistleblower
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street
Journal with internal documents that exposed the company’s awareness of harms
caused by of its products and decisions. Haugen went public on “60
Minutes” on Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee
on Tuesday.

Also read: Tech giants’ back and forth on Facebook outage has the internet in splits

Haugen had also anonymously filed complaints with federal law
enforcement alleging that Facebook’s own research shows how it magnifies hate
and misinformation, leads to increased polarization, and that Instagram,
specifically, can harm teenage girls’ mental health.

The Journal’s stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a
picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests over the public
good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company’s
vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a
memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent
years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”