Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp reconnecting after nearly six-hour outage

• ByAyushi Ray     |    October 5, 2021

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp reconnecting after nearly six-hour outage. Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark at around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT), in what website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure it had ever seen. Around 5:45 pm ET, some users began to regain partial access to the three apps. The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. “To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it ”may take some time to get to 100%.”

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9% on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks. Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trade following resumption of service. 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. Soon after the outage started, Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or say how many users were affected by the outage.

Follow Startup Story