NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp returned online Monday evening — albeit with some issues — after an apparent hours-long global outage.
On Twitter, Facebook communications executive Andy Stone had that the company was aware of the outage and working to fix it shortly after the apps went down just before noon.
“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 three social networks began to experience issues just after 11:30 a.m. Facebook owns all three social media sites.
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…