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Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp all went offline on Monday (October 4). DownDetector.com shows reports of outages on Facebook spiking around 11:30 a.m. ET. At the outage's peak, over 125,000 people reported issues on the site. In addition, nearly 100,000 people reported having problems connecting to Instagram at the same time.
Facebook confirmed the outage on Twitter and said it was working to solve the issue.
"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook tweeted.
Around 6:30 p.m. ET, Facebook announced that everything was coming back online.
"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us," Facebook said.
While the source of the outage has not been confirmed, The Verge reports that the issue is likely related to DNS issues. Cloudflare Senior Vice President of Emerging Tech and Incubation Dane Knecht tweeted that Facebook's "[border gateway protocol] routes have been withdrawn from the internet."
". @Facebook DNS and other services are down. It appears their BGP routes have been withdrawn from the internet. @Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 started seeing high failure in last 20mins," Knecht wrote on Twitter.
Knecht explained that once the issue is resolved, it will take some time for everything to return to normal.
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said there is no evidence the outage as the result of a cyber attack.
"Nothing we're seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack. Most likely explanation is that the company's Internet routes (BGP) were withdrawn by mistake during maintenance. #hugops," Prince tweeted.
The outage comes less than 24 hours after a whistleblower identified herself on 60 Minutes and accused the social media company of "prioritizing their own profits over public safety."
Facebook's stock tanked on the news, losing nearly 5% of its value, closing at 326 points. According to Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg lost $7 billion due to the sell-off.