Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram go down in widespread outage

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have been down for more than three hours in a widespread outage on Monday. The three social networks — all owned by Facebook — started having issues around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector, a crowdsourced website that tracks online outages. The company’s status-tracking website was also down around noon ET. 

WhatsApp acknowledged that it was having issues shortly after noon ET, saying in a tweet that it’s “working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.” Similar messages were shared on the Twitter accounts for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. 

It’s not immediately clear what caused the issue for the three properties. Security expert Brian Krebs said it appears to be a DNS related-issue, adding that something “caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.”

In addition to Facebook’s services and apps being down, some of the company’s internal tools were also reportedly impacted by the outage. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a tweet that it felt like a “snow day.“

As is often the case with outages, users flocked to other social networks to note that the social networks were down. By 12:06 p.m. ET “Instagram and Facebook” was the top trending topic on Twitter in the US, with “WhatsApp” and #instagramdown also gaining traction.

Read more: Funniest memes and jokes about Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outage

Other trends for Facebook and Instagram quickly dominated other locations in the top 30 spots on Twitter’s list.

CNET has reached out to Facebook for additional comment and we’ll update when we hear back.