Facebook faces technical disaster, company’s share price falls

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Global users are experiencing outages on Facebook, including all social networks the company owns, which include Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. When navigating to these websites, a server error will appear — Instagram shows a “5xx server error,” which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook’s servers. Users are also unable to send messages or load new content on the mobile apps for these platforms. Even Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality platform, is experiencing outages, according to a tweet the platform posted.

It appears that the outage is caused by a DNS (domain name server) fail — this is the naming structure that forms the web’s infrastructure. So, if you try to navigate to facebook.com right now, the internet won’t know where to find facebook.com.

The trillion-dollar company, which boasts 2.9 billion users, has remained down for at least an hour and counting. At the same time, Facebook stock has gone down about 5.5 percent. This follows a recent downward trend for the stock as Facebook faces scrutiny in the US Senate after whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal.

According to Reuters report, Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.

Meanwhile, the social-media giant’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 22,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 3,000 users.

WhatsApp was also trending on Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), with more than 850,000 tweets.

“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment,” the messaging platform’s official Twitter handle said.

“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for a comment.

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