WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in global outage hitting the social networks.
The three apps are owned by Facebook, an American company offering online social networking services, and as a result use the same infrastructure and all stopped functioning properly around 5pm Nigerian time.
WhatsApp was the first to fail - initially the web version, then the phone app, before Facebook and Instagram followed suit, leaving users unable to view their messages on the three social networks.
The outage wasn't concentrated on one region either, with reports of issues throughout the Africa, USA, UK and Europe, as well as Latin America.
As is somewhat customary during such outages, users thought that the internet itself was down, or there was an issue with devices. However, other social networks such as Twitter, TikTok and Telegram were operating as normal.
The last time the three Facebook-owned networks went down was on March 19, 2021 and on that occasion it took a couple of hours for the networks to regain proper functionality.
Facebook's internal systems used by employees also went down. The company did not say what might be causing the outage, and while it can be normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, one on a global scale is rare.
Madory said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn. The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed. DNS translates an address like "facebook.com" to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook's DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.
WhatsApp have updated users on Twitter, but only acknowledged there was an issue, without revealing why the service has gone down.
"We're aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment," WhatsApp tweeted. "We're working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible."
Like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram haven't been able to update the feeds on their applications. Though they have issued a message via Twitter.
"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."
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