The social media giant, which is the second-largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $US545,000 ($747,000) in US ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

Multiple employees said they had not been told what had gone wrong. One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down. It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare.įacebook's response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said. Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's outgoing chief technology officer, tweeted that while Facebook services were coming back online it 'may take some time to get to 100 per cent'.

Six hours later, about 8:45am AEDT, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram users began to regain partial access to the social media app. Website monitoring group Downdetector said it was the largest such failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports globally. 'We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,' the official Twitter accounts said. The social media giants confirmed the outage, which began around 2:45am AEDT, with messages posted to Twitter early on Tuesday. Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.'

Facebook apologised but did not immediately explain what caused the failure.įacebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an apology on his personal Facebook page, reading: 'Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now.

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