Amid an already long list of headaches, Facebook suffered yet another on Monday: an outage that took down its namesake site, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
As of early Monday morning, visitors to the Facebook social networking service and Messenger chat service are greeted with a message that says, “Sorry, something went wrong.” Meanwhile, a visit to the Instagram photo and video sharing service leads to a “5xx Server Error” message, while WhatsApp shows the “Connecting to WhatsApp” prompt without actually doing it.
According to the Internet activity tracking service Downdetector, users started submitting outage reports about Facebook beginning at around 11:30 a.m ET.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone confirmed the outage, saying on Twitter that the company is “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outage comes a day after a blockbuster interview with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was aired on the television news show 60 Minutes. Haugen publicly revealed herself on the show as the whistleblower who leaked a series of explosive internal Facebook research to the Wall Street Journal and to lawmakers detailing the extent to which the social media giant knew that its services were used for spreading misinformation and that they contributed to negative mental health issues for some teenage girls.
Haugen alleged in the interview that Facebook prematurely deactivated certain safeguards intended to prevent the spread of misinformation and offensive content soon after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. She alleged that as a result, Facebook played a significant role in sowing the seeds of the violent riots on Jan. 6, in which pro-Trump advocates stormed the Capitol.
Facebook has downplayed the significance of the whistleblower’s documents, arguably the company’s most significant crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.
“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” Facebook vice president of policy and public affairs Nick Clegg said in a memo to employees that was reported on by the New York Times. “But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.”
Coins2Day contacted Facebook for more information and will update this story if it responds.
Update, October 4, 2021 at 7:00 PM ET: Facebook and its family of services appear to be back online.
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