A major outage hit Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms across the world, with the platform slowly coming back online after a six-hour outage

The company said it was “aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app” and it was working on restoring access.

The outage is believed to be caused by DNS routing problems, however the exact cause hasn’t been confirmed by Facebook.

The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed.

However, after a DNS issue like this, it could take hours for everything to work properly on every network.

Facebook CTO apologies for outages

“We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible,” the outgoing CTO said.

“*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible,” he tweeted.

NYT reporter Sheera Frenkel has reported that Facebook employees are unable to even access their own building due to their entry badges failing.

Employees told The Verge they were using work-provided Outlook email accounts, allowing Facebook workers to email each other but unable to send or receive emails from external addresses.

Users reported being unable to access Facebook all around the world, a rare happening.

Is this Facebook’s biggest outage?

This is the worst outage for Facebook since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day, but the service only had 80 million users then.

Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.

Facebook’s most recent major outage took place in 2019, when apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for nearly 24 hours.

Facebook is losing millions as outages continues