Denver – Along with its subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp, Facebook suffered a catastrophic outage Monday that has left the three services unusable for several hours.
Speaking via Twitter, Facebook officials stated they were still exploring potential solutions to the issue.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” said the tweet.
According to internet analysts, this marks the worst outage for Facebook since 2008, when a bug caused Facebook to shut down for nearly a whole day.
In that incident, however, only 80 million people were registered on the site and were affected by the bug. This is a sharp contrast from the nearly 3 billion people that now have an account on the world’s most popular social media platform.
Although the cause of the current outage is unknown, many experts believe the malfunction of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) could have caused the sudden stop in operations.
Earlier this year, an outage in a CDN site known as Fastly led to a shutdown of several major global sites including Reddit, the New York Times, and Amazon.
Facebook is also currently embroiled in accusations from a whistleblower that leaked the company’s internal research to the public.
In the research, Facebook executives appear to be aware of the negative effects of misinformation on their site, as well as the negative effects of Instagram on the psychological health of young people.
The whistleblower, identified as former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, is scheduled to testify on her findings before a Senate committee on Tuesday.
The effects of Facebook’s shutdown could also be seen in the financial world. Latest reports showed the company’s stock value dropped 5% during the course of the shutdown. This marks the company’s worst stock performance for 2021.
With an unstable internet presence and allegations of malicious behavior, it’s unclear what Facebook’s future will be as more countries begin cracking down on the internet behemoth’s rapidly expanding influence.
