SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services began returning online Monday after a massive and lengthy outage that added to the social network s woes.
Facebook s family of apps essentially “disappeared” from the internet for several hours after a traffic routing problem that made the sites unreachable by users, according to Cloudflare, a website security company.
Facebook struggled to end an hours-long outage that potentially hit tens of millions of users across its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Tracker Downdetector said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first popping up around 1545 GMT.
Roughly seven hours later, the services began returning online.
“We ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now,” Facebook said in a tweet late Monday afternoon in Silicon Valley.
Facebook had “reconnected to the global internet” as of 2228 GMT but it was expected to take a bit of time to get the social network s family of services back running smoothly, web security company Cloudflare said in a blog post.
Facebook has not communicated on the possible cause of the outage, but cyber security experts noted they had found signs that online routes that lead people to the social giant were disrupted.