NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have returned online Monday evening — albiet with some issues — after an apparent hours-long global outage.
The apps returned online around 6 p.m. after they were downed for about six hours.
"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry," Facebook posted to its official Twitter account.
"We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us."
Shortly after the company's apps went offline just before noon, Facebook communications executive Andy Stone posted to Twitter that the company was aware of the outage and working to fix it.
“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,” he wrote.
According to Down Detector, a crowdsourced website tracking online outages, the two social networks and messaging app—all owned by Facebook—began experiencing issues just before noon.
Facebook’s status tracking website also went down around the same time.
Around 3:45 p.m., Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said teams were still working to fix the issue, saying the social media company was experiencing "networking issues."
Users on Instagram reported seeing a 5xx Server Error message, while Facebook was displaying a “something went wrong” message.
The outages led to an apparent surge in Twitter usage. The app's official support account said that an uptick in users led to issues with the service's tweet reply and direct message features.
“Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned," Twitter's support team wrote. "Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!"
It remains unclear what caused the outage and how far the outage extended.
Users in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia were reporting outages.
This is a developing story…