WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps go down

Millions of users on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram reported issues that the apps are down. The apps went offline for many users worldwide, the company said as it worked on restoring the services. The error message on Facebook webpage indicated a possibility of Domain Name System(DNS) issue. The DNS is a naming system that directs web addresses to the intended destinations over the internet. According to the security experts, DNS failure is a possibility, which translates domain names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer.

Facebook Inc on its twiiter account said “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 Inc admitted that their users were indeed having problems accessing the apps but didn’t provide details about the cause of the problem or logs of how many users were affected by the outage.

The cause of the outage is not yet clear but the security experts monitoring the problem said the outage could have been caused by an error in configuration which because of internal mistake. However, they said there is a theoretical possibility of a sabotage by an insider. Hacking was viewed as the least happenings in this case.Heavy denial-of-service attack that could jeopardize the world popular sites require effective communication from the powerful criminal gangs or heavy techniques.

Facebook Inc has almost 2 billion active users on daily basis and its shares fell in the afternoon by 5.5 % in its trading moving towards its worst day in almost a year. Detector down which tracks logs and outages by combining reports from various sources including user-submitted errors indicate there more than 50,000 incidents of users registering their issues with Instagram and Facebook. Definitely, the outage has affected many people across the globe, many users have even doubted their internet service providers with some restarting their phones thinking the problem could be on their own.

The instant messaging WhatsApp was also down and affected more than 35,000 users while Facebook messenger was down for roughly 9,800 users. The only social media available for communication was Twitter with the Social media Giant Facebook using the same platform to communicate to its users.

The outage came after a segment was aired in which the Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen claimed Facebook Inc is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hatred, misinformation, violence but Facebook has tried to hide that information. Facebook has disagreed with such claims.