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Facebook, Messenger, Instagram And WhatsApp Are Back Online

Facebook, Messenger, Instagram And WhatsApp Are Back Online

The sites and apps have been offline for several hours.

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are back up and running after a social media blackout.

The sites and apps have been down for hours and Facebook's CTO explained it was because of 'networking issues'.

TechCrunch reported that, when people were hopping on the sites for their morning, midday or evening scroll, they were confronted with a server error.

"Instagram shows a '5xx server error', which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook's servers," the outlet says.

TJ Roth/Sipa USA

"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."

But the sites have slowly been coming back online for people all around the world.

During the outage, many posted memes on Twitter illustrating the platform's momentary victory over its competitors.

And it would appear Twitter is absolutely loving its moment in the limelight, having simply posted a tweet saying: "Hello literally everyone."

Many other big names took the opportunity to play nicely with Twitter, with McDonald's tweeting in a reply: "Hi what can I get u?"

Twitter hit back: "59.6 million nuggets for my friends."

It's estimated the outages was costing Facebook upwards of $220 million every single hour.

According to News Corp, there was a huge sell-off of Facebook stock, which saw its value plummet by five per cent, which equates to a casual US$7 billion.

That's seen Mark Zuckerberg fall to the fifth richest person on the planet and is now behind Bill Gates as he net worth dropped to $120.9 billion.

Featured Image Credit: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy Live News

Topics: News, Technology