In a global outage, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook have been unavailable for several hours.
After thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5 p.m. on Monday, the sites verified on Twitter that they were aware of the issues and were trying to repair them.
Nearly 50,000 individuals have reported the outages on Facebook, according to data from the web service monitoring company DownDetector.
The majority of complaints (72 percent) were about problems with the website, while others were about problems with the server connection and the app.
More than 75,000 people have complained about WhatsApp, with 43% citing issues with the programme itself, 28% citing server connection issues, and 28% citing difficulty with transmitting messages.
More than 30,000 Instagram users complained about the same thing, with 51 percent blaming the app, 26 percent blaming the server connection, and 23 percent blaming the website.
After 4 p.m., a graph on the DownDetector website revealed a distinct surge.
The disruption occurred just one day after a whistleblower said in a US interview that Facebook prioritises its own interests over the public good.
“We're aware that some people are having difficulty with WhatsApp at the moment,” WhatsApp announced on Twitter.
“We're striving to restore normalcy and will provide an update as soon as feasible. “I appreciate your patience.”
“Instagram and friends are having some troubles right now, and you may be having issues utilising them,” Instagram warned. Please bear with us; we're working on it.”
“We're aware that some individuals are having problems accessing our applications and products,” a Facebook spokeswoman stated.
“We are attempting to restore normalcy as soon as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”
Cyber security specialist Jake Moore, there's a "possibility" the problem is linked to a cyber attack.
He told the PA news agency, "There have been multiple reports, and I'm struggling to figure out exactly what happened- I'm reading it could be DNS related, which implies the connection doesn't know where to go to your device."
“It might be a human error or a software issue hiding in the shadows, but whatever the case, Facebook needs to do everything it can to avoid further panic.
“The biggest issue is the fear of a cyber assault, but as we saw with Fastly in the summer, I would hedge my bets on that not being the case because we're talking about one of the world's largest organisations, but anything can happen.”
“The downtime is caused by changes made to the Facebook network infrastructure,” said Adam Leon Smith of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and a software testing expert.
“Similar network-level incidents have caused several of the recent high-profile outages.
“It is reported by unidentified Facebook sources on Reddit claim that the network upgrades have also stopped engineers from remotely connecting to resolve the issues, causing solutions to be delayed.
“Notably, many organisations now characterise their physical infrastructure as code, but few apply the same level of testing rigour to that code as they do to their fundamental business logic.”
