Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram services restored after hours-long blackout

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were down across the globe on Monday evening. According to reports, there were issues observed in the loading of the three apps for more than 6 hours. The users were reportedly able to access social media platforms for over six hours after the social media apps along with WhatsApp crashed. The night when an alleged global outage and technical error disrupted their services.

Facebook officially confirmed on Twitter and said that the multi-tech company was “aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app” and it was working on restoring access. However, the social media giant has not yet confirmed, what might be causing the outage, which began around later on Monday evening. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York, India and Europe.

https://twitter.com/HawksRose/status/1445073777306439682

I'm getting DNS errors for Facebook here, so I wonder if their DNS servers are down.
— Brandon (@CtoBrandon) October 4, 2021

Facebook took to Twitter to confirm the news and

We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021

In certain regions of the world, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were unavailable on Monday. Many users took to Twitter to address their concerns.

Responding to the concerns raised by the app users on Twitter, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer said:

Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry.
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

Later, Whatsapp also officially announced that the company had successfully been able to fix the issues:

We’re now back and running at 100%.

💚 Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day. 💚
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 5, 2021

However, Facebook did not specify what caused the global outage. Website and app outages are common but are not so common on a worldwide scale. While it may be too early to say if this is an issue around the DNS server down. Moreover, this seems to be the longest global failure that has been observed.