(CMR) Facebook has a major outage this morning ironically coinciding in time with a live interview on CNBC defending the company's policies and its handling of research data suggesting that Instagram is harmful to teens. All three apps owned by Facebook are impacted by the outage with millions around the world without service.
Facebook’s internal tools for employees are also affected by this problem. Facebook stock is down 6% in light of the outage.
The issue is widespread and is impacting other applications such as WhatsApp and Messenger.
Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.
Online network experts speculated it may involve an error with DNS, or the domain name system, for Facebook sites.
DNS is often compared to an address book or phone book for the internet, pointing web browsers to the computer system which serves the website they are looking for.
Naturally, Twitter began to capitalize on the outage with a number of memes being circulated by Twitter users.
OffReg issued a statement via email around 1:10 pm indicating that the outage was not caused by any local providers but instead was worldwide.
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