Facebook, Instagram and Other App Offline

Earlier today, Facebook’s entire global network suddenly went offline and nearly four hours later there’s no sign of it being restored and no one from the Facebook has offered an explanation as to why the outage occurred  or when it will be fixed.

Facebook communications exec Andy Stone said on Twitter:  “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.”

The social network and all its apps began displaying error messages just before noon Eastern time, users reported. All of the company’s family of apps, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — showed outages, according to the site downdetector.com, which monitors web traffic and site activity. 

Instagram.com is flashing a 5xx Server Error message at this time, while the Facebook site merely tells you that something went wrong when you try to access the site. The issue also appears to be affecting its virtual reality App, Oculus. Users can load games they already have installed and the browser still works, but social features or installing new games does not. The outage is thorough enough that it’s affecting Workplace from Facebook customers as well.

Facebook, Inc. (FB) stock, which started the day down after this past weekend's whistleblower report,  in which Facebook was accused of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation, fell further and was down 5.3% in afternoon trading on Monday.