Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had been down for more than four hours as of this writing. All three platforms stopped working shortly before noon ET with the websites and apps for all three services responding with server errors.
It’s not currently known what’s causing the outage.
It marks the worst outage for the technology giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day, affecting about 80 million users. The platform currently boasts 3 billion users.
Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer apologized in a statement posted to Twitter.
“Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” Schroepfer wrote. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook blamed a server configuration change for that outage.
