Social networking giant Facebook is “experiencing networking issues”, said Mike Schroepfer, the platform’s Chief Technology Officer. The clarification comes hours after a global outage was reported around 11:45 ET (9:15 pm IST), which is expected to impact millions.

Schroepfer, in a Tweet on Monday, went on to apologise to those who were impacted by the outage of the social media platform and reassured that the Facebook officials are finding a way to restore functionality. 

Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Schroepfer wrote, “*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

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According to September 2021 media reports, Schroepfer, who has been at Facebook for 13 years and is a close friend of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, stepping down from the social media company. He will be succeeded by longtime executive Andrew Bosworth next year.

Even though no official statement highlighting the cause of the global outage has been released so far by Facebook, experts said it appears that the social media platform withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties, according to reports from Associated Press.

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Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simply could not locate it.

The prolonged outage, which has now dragged on for over four hours as of 2 am IST (4:30 pm ET), has also been experienced by other platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp.

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 bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting, according to reports from Associated Press.  

(With AP inputs)