All of the major Facebook-owned social media networks and apps including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook itself were reported down in locations across the world on Monday evening.
Attempts to visit Facebook’s website were met with the error: “This site can’t be reached www.facebook.com’s server IP address could not be found.”
Facebook’s own website to check the site’s status, status.fb.com, was also down as of publishing.
The outage comes as a whistleblower is set to deliver testimony to Congress about the company’s allegedly harmful policies. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, said Facebook had shown “over and over again” that is chooses “profit over safety”.
Her efforts including giving documents to the Wall Street Journal showing how Facebook was aware that Instagram worsened body image issues among teenagers, and how it treated users and acted on user complaints differently based on their relative importance.
