Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down in global outage @RTENews

Facebook’s suite of apps, including popular photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, were down for tens of thousands of users, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations.

A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies took down multiple websites in July.

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.