Facebook, as well as two of its other platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced outages on Monday. The cause was confirmed to be a DNS — or domain name services — issue.
The company released a statement saying, “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.”
The outages come one day after former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen came forward as the whistleblower who filed at least eight complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission last month containing tens of thousands of pages of internal company research. According to Haugen, the documents prove the social media giant has lied about the effectiveness of its public efforts to remove misinformation, hate and violent content from its platform.
Tech reporters and experts quickly took to Twitter to explain the issue.
“We don’t know why this change was made. It could well have been the result of an internal, system wide change or update that went awry. It’s all speculation at this point why. FB alone is in control over its DNS records,” wrote journalist Brian Krebs.
The outages also came the same day Facebook’s vice president of content policy, Monika Bickert, appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to address the reports.
“If we were a company who didn’t care about safety, if we were about trying to prioritize profit over safety, we wouldn’t do this kind of research,” she said during her interview. “The whole point is understanding how we can be better and make a better experience.”