Facebook's CTO Explains Why The Site Is Down

Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have been out around the world for several hours.

Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer, has taken to Twitter to explain the reason behind the social media blackout.

He wrote: "*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."

There's no telling how long it will take before the online websites and apps are back up and running but you can probably guarantee that they've tried the old trick of turning it off and on.

Naturally, everyone wondering what the hell has happened to their precious social media sites ended up flocking to Twitter to see if they could get any answers.

Many posted memes illustrating the platform's momentary victory over its competitors, with Twitter even becoming the object of the Distracted Boyfriend's diverted attention.

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."

TechCrunch reports that users have been met with a server error when navigating to the respective sites.

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

"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."

Alamy

Posting on Twitter, Facebook said in a statement: "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."

A similar tweet from Instagram read: "Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we're on it."

A tweet on the official WhatsApp page also said: "We're aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We're working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!"

Topics: News, Technology

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie