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Facebook, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp, have gone down across the globe, affecting all mobile phone apps and websites of platforms related to it.
As the social media giant works on restoring its services, there is still no clear cause for the outages on all of the platforms.
However, it’s been suggested that there was an issue with the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows web addresses to take users to their destinations.
Outages across Australia were being reported by users of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp from around 3 am AEDT local time on Tuesday.
According to Downdetector’s Australian site, thousands of Aussies reported having issues with accessing Facebook’s websites and apps.
The Associated Press also reported that Facebook’s internal systems used by employees had also gone down.
A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.
Security experts tracking the event said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error that is caused by an internal mistake. Although sabotage could not be ruled out, it was less likely that the cause was an outside hack.
A massive denial-of-service (DoS) attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.
Facebook acknowledged the issue but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience,” Facebook said.
Shares of Facebook fell 5.5 per cent in Monday afternoon trading in the US after its platforms went offline, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.
Downdetector – which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform – showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.
WhatsApp was also down for more than 35,000 users while Messenger was down for nearly 9800 users.
Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps were also facing issues.
The outage comes a day after a Facebook whistleblower accused the firm of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation, and said her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
With AAP
Eliza Sayon is an experienced writer who specialises in corporate and government communications. She is the content producer for Public Spectrum, an online knowledge-based platform for and about the Australian public sector.
