Facebook experienced its biggest global outage since 2008, with Instagram and WhatsApp also down as of Monday afternoon.
The outage began at around 12:00 p.m. ET. As of 6:00 p.m. ET, Instagram service appeared to have been restored to some users.
Facebook has not issued a direct response in relation to the issue and did not immediately respond to HYPEBEAST for comment on the cause of the outage.
According to CNBC, the outage marks the worst since 2008, when a bug took Facebook offline for about a day, though the site’s audience was merely a fraction of the three billion users it boasts today.
According to The Verge, Facebook engineers have been sent to one of the company’s main data centers in California to try and problem solve on location.
Mike Schroepfer, the company’s chief technology officer, tweeted that the company was experiencing “networking issues” and was working to “debug and restore as fast as possible.”
*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
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Instagram offered no explanation, but acknowledged that it was “having a little bit of a hard time.”
Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 4, 2021
Instagram head Adam Mosseri didn’t expand on the issue, but said the outage “does feel like a snow day.”
Them fighting words… but it does feel like a snow day.
— Adam Mosseri ? (@mosseri) October 4, 2021
People around the globe took to Twitter to vent their frustrations, share memes or poke fun at the situation.
hello literally everyone
— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021
#Instagram is down, what are you doing? (Wrong answers only) pic.twitter.com/DAtXycVFEa
— HYPEBEAST (@HYPEBEAST) October 4, 2021
Me waiting around for Instagram to come back ? #instagramdisabled #Instagram pic.twitter.com/h3Z2g97R7K
— Ashlyn Brooke (@makeupbyashlynb) October 4, 2021
Everybody rushing to Twitter after whatSapp, #instagram and Facebook is down #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/mZd0hC18Zn
— Josh O John (@josinomilito) October 4, 2021
In other news, Facebook is spending $50 million USD to “responsibly” build out the metaverse.
