Facebook appeared to have fixed networking issues that made its flagship app — as well as Instagram and WhatsApp — unusable Monday in an outage lasting more than six hours, Trend reports citing Variety.
Users reported a spike in problems for Facebook’s family of services starting around 11:35 a.m. ET. By 6 p.m. ET, some of the social giant’s services had become available again.
The outage was the longest downtime for Facebook since March 2019, when the service was down for about 24 hours across multiple apps.
Experts attributed Facebook’s problems Monday to a configuration change in the company’s domain name system (DNS) entries, which effectively made Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger invisible to internet users worldwide.
Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer apologized for the issues in a tweet Monday afternoon, attributing the downtime to unspecified “networking issues.”
The outage also prevented some Facebook employees from being able to access email and using company-issued mobile phones, and knocked out its internal communications system, Workplace, the New York Times reported.