Facebook confirmed on Monday that users worldwide reported issues accessing applications owned by the company, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus.
Facebook said it is looking into the issue and apologized for the inconvenience. The cause for the outages was not immediately confirmed.
The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:45 ET. It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York and Europe.
Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.
The reason for the outages was not immediately clear. Facebook’s internal communications platforms were also reported down.
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company, said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn.
The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed. DNS translates an address like “facebook.com” to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook’s DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.
