Okay calm down, it’s not the rapture and it’s not just in Nigeria. It is just a glitch.
Facebook-owned properties — including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — were hit by sweeping outages Monday which left users locked out of the platforms.
The issues started around 11:45 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector, and were hitting users globally.
At 12:30 p.m. ET, the outages appeared to subside, according to DownDetector, though tens of thousands of users were still reporting problems.
Shortly after noon, Facebook’s site returned a message that read, “This site can’t be reached.”
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, acknowledged the outage on Twitter, saying, “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.”
Twitter users responded by mocking the company, saying that “the world would be better if you just left it all switched off” and that “we’re actually enjoying the lack of disinformation and misinformation.”
In a curious twist, by early afternoon, the domain name “Facebook.com” was listed for sale by Domain Tools. The organization behind the domain registration was still listed as Facebook, Inc. and it’s unclear why the site’s address would be listed for sale.
Facebook reportedly said in an internal memo to employees that it appeared “to be a DNS issue that is impacting both internal and external access to our tools and apps,” according to Dylan Byers, a senior correspondent for Puck News.
A DNS, or Domain Name System, connects domain names to the right IP addresses so that people can access popular websites. Earlier this year, an outage at a major DNS operator took out huge swaths of the internet briefly.
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