Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp suffer outage

(Eagle News) — Millions of users on the popular social media site Facebook could not access the company’s main page as well as its other services on Monday. Instead of users’ usual feed, they were greeted by the error message: “Sorry, something went wrong.”

The social media giant took to Twitter to acknowledge the outage.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook tweeted. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Outage tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington and Paris, with problems being reported from around 1545 GMT. The site also reported outages on Instagram and WhatsApp.

(FILES) this file photo taken on October 05, 2020 in Toulouse, southwestern France, shows logos of US social networks Facebook and Instagram on the screens of a tablet and a mobile phone. – Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage on October 4, 2021, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP)

The outage comes in the wake of a whistleblower’s accusation that Facebook knew its products, including Instagram, were doing harm to children’s mental health.

Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest — but said in an interview with CBS news show “60 Minutes” that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen before.

Haugen leaked documents from Facebook and claimed that the world’s largest social media platform contributed to young girls struggles with body image and fueled hate.

(Eagle News Service)