Facebook Inc. suffered a devastating outage that shut out many of its 2.7 billion global users, idled some of the company’s employees and prompted a public apology from the chief technology officer.
The company’s family of social-media apps, including the main social network, photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp, began to return online for some users about 5:45 p.m. New York time, more than six hours after the incident began. It was one of the longest failures in recent memory. Downdetector, which monitors internet problems, said the Facebook outage was the largest it had seen, with more than 10.6 million reports worldwide.
“To everyone who was affected by the outages on our platforms today: we’re sorry,” Facebook said in a statement. “We know billions of people and businesses around the world depend on our products and services to stay connected. We appreciate your patience as we come back online.”
“*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted while the platforms were offline. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook blamed a server configuration change for that outage.
The outage comes one day after the whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealed herself ahead of an interview with “60 Minutes.”
The documents, first reported in a series of Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things.
Facebook shares closed down almost 5% on the day – in 2019.
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