What happened?

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went offline for users across the globe, the social media giant said on Monday, as it worked on restoring its services.

What could be the reason?

The issue affecting the services could not be immediately confirmed, but the error message on the webpage of Facebook Inc suggested a problem with Domain Name System (DNS).

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.

What experts say

Security experts tracking the situation said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most popular sites, on the other hand, would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.


A hit...

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 5.5% in afternoon trading on Monday, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.


And the quantum

Downdetector showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

Meanwhile, the social-media giant's instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users.

Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.


Third-party worries

Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.

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