Mike Schroepfer – CTO @ Facebook.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for users across the globe, the social media giant said on Monday, as hours later it scrambled to restore the services after being hit by one of its longest outages.
The outage began around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT) and service had yet to be restored more than four hours later.
Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. Facebook itself controls the relevant settings, suggesting the problem was an internal one.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc