On Monday afternoon, nearly six hours after an outage immobilized the social media site, Facebook and Instagram appeared to be partially restored to the worldwide internet.
With 10.6 million problem reports globally, website monitoring organization Downdetector claimed Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark at around noon Eastern time, in the greatest such failure it had ever seen.
Some Facebook users began to restore limited access to the social media app at 5:45 p.m. ET. WhatsApp’s connection issues persisted for at least some users.
The outage was the business’s second setback in as many days, following a whistleblower’s accusation on Sunday that the corporation has consistently prioritized profit before cracking down on hate speech and misinformation.
After the whistleblower claim, shares of Facebook, which has roughly 2 billion daily active users, opened down and fell further to trade down 5.3 percent in afternoon trading on Monday. In the midst of a broader selloff in technology equities, they were on track for their worst day in over a year.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. — Reuters