Beginning at 12:16 pm EST on October 4, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook took to Twitter to confirm outages across the respective platforms. The websites for each are also currently inaccessible.
Internal systems used by Facebook’s employees are down as well.
Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014.
With error messages registering on Facebook, it appears that the Domain Name System (DNS) routes that make Facebook accessible have been withdrawn.
Additionally, Facebook’s shares are down by over 5%.
The Facebook outage comes one day after Frances Haugen, former employee of the social media giant, revealed she was the whistleblower who shared data from Facebook to journalists, lawmakers, and others.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen a data scientist who was previously a product manager for Facebook, said on CBS‘s “60 Minutes.”
Haugen is slated to testify before Congress on October 5. She will elaborate on the documents she shared.
In mid September, the Wall Street Journal also published a report (based on leaked documents from Haugen) accusing Instagram of knowing the platform was harmful to teenage girls specifically.
The report also read, “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression…This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” Pratiti Raychoudhury, Vice President, Head of Research at Facebook, shared via Facebook Newsroom that the Wall Street Journal’s interpretation of the statistics were “not accurate.”
Later in the month, Instagram announced it was pausing work on a platform dubbed “Instagram Kids,” which was to be aimed at tween internet perusers. Facebook said it would be taking the opportunity to listen to “parents, experts, policymakers and regulators,” Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, wrote.
