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Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to LinkedinTopline After more than five hours of being offline, Facebook said one of the worst outages in the company’s history is drawing to a close, a blackout that also downed the tech giant’s other major social media platforms, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Tens of thousands of Facebook users faced outages on the company’s platforms on Monday.

Getty Images Key Facts Facebook said in a statement that the company’s apps were coming back online Monday evening, although CTO Mike Schroepfer said it “may take some time” for services to go back to 100% functionality.

In public statements, the company and officials were apologetic about the outage and the effect it had on Facebook’s millions of users.

It’s still unclear what exactly caused the outage, but experts believe it’s tied to problems with the company’s internet infrastructure that allows internet users to interact with Facebook products.

Tangent Facebook shares plunged 5% amid a broader tech sell-off, pushing the stock nearly 15% below an all-time high set just last month. CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone lost $5.9 billion Monday, according to a Forbes estimate.

Key Background According to outage tracking service DownDetector, the number of outages reported by users spiked for all four of Facebook’s major services around 11:30 a.m. EDT. In 2008, Facebook went dark for nearly a whole day over a bug that left many of the platform’s 80 million users unable to load their timelines over a bug, according to CNBC. Facebook dealt with another major outage in 2019, when the platform which by then had grown to 2.3 billion monthly users and a family of other services, went offline for more than 14 hours because of a server configuration change, according to the BBC. With more than 2.89 billion active monthly users last quarter according to the company’s self-reported figures, Facebook is the most popular social media platform on earth. Facebook’s platforms have experienced several major outages this year.

Further Reading These Three Letter Tech Acronyms Are Likely Behind Today’s Mega Outage At Facebook (Forbes)

Facebook And Apple Plunge Into Correction Territory As Tech Stock Selloff Intensifies (Forbes)

Zuckerberg Loses $5.9 Billion In A Day As Facebook Faces Rare Outage, Whisteblower Testimony (Forbes)

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