A new week had just started and that was when Facebook’s week just went from bad to worse. According to public statements made from the three Facebook services, Facebook (FB), Instagram and WhatsApp all have been suffering from outages midday Monday.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Downdetector also showed that there were almost more than 20,000 reports made by people about having issues with Facebook and Instagram.
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website said when trying to load.
For each of the services they provide, the outage tracking site Down Detector logged almost tens of thousands of reports. On Monday, Facebook’s own site wasn’t loading at all for almost an hour. Other than Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were still accessible to users but they were not able to load new content on Instagram feeds or send messages on WhatsApp.
The reason why there was an outage was not immediately clear to anyone.
The outage came in the morning after “60 Minutes” aired a segment that showed Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed the company is pretty much aware of the way their platforms are being used to spread hate, violence and misinformation. They also said that Facebook has tried to hide the evidence. Facebook has pushed back on those claims made on them.
Following Haugen’s release of thousands of pages of internal documents to regulators and the Wall Street Journal, the interview followed weeks of reporting and criticism of Facebook. On Tuesday, Haugen is going to testify before a Senate subcommittee.
In midday trading Monday, Facebook shares were down more than 5%, putting Facebook on pace for its worst trading day in nearly a year.
