But at the same time it has been bringing those various apps together, to use the same underlying technologies – not only making it harder for any regulation to force it to be broken apart, but also meaning that any technical problem with one server immediately hits its other apps too. They included not just its large apps but virtual reality platform Oculus, and office social network Workplace.įacebook has faced criticism from regulators for its vast size, and has been accused of the US Federal Trade Commission of operating a monopoly over personal social media in the country.

In all, a vast array of Facebook of services went down. That is often referred to as the phone book of the internet, taking the URL a person types into their browser – such as – and turning it into a numerical address that can then be asked for the data that makes up the website being accessed. None offered any clear indication of how the problems had begun.įacebook’s problems appeared to be related to the domain name system, or DNS. Similar posts came from the official accounts run for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, as well as its spokesperson Andy Stone. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

“*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” said Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer, the outgoing chief technology officer, in a tweet. Instead, its employees and official accounts opted to apologise vaguely on Twitter, and promised to do what they could to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

Facebook gave little indication of what had caused the issue, or how it was eventually fixed.

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