Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Are All Down

Facebook and its entire suite of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, began suffering an outage Monday completely preventing users from accessing the services.

The sites went down 9 a.m. on the West Coast, where the company has its San Francisco Bay Area headquarters, and had not come back online more than four hours later ― a stunningly long outage for one of the world’s biggest tech giants. 

Facebook hasn’t said what’s causing the outage, but it’s unlikely to be related to a cybersecurity attack, two Facebook security team members told The New York Times, speaking on the condition of anonymity. 

The company acknowledged the problem on Twitter. There’s no word yet on when the services should go back online. 

The sites went down right as Facebook’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, was appearing live on CNBC to defend the company against a whistleblower’s accusations that it prioritizes profits over stopping hate speech and embraces algorithms that allow such rhetoric to thrive across its platforms. That whistleblower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday in a hearing about protecting kids online. 

The outage is creating chaos within the company, a source told an Associated Press reporter, as all internal systems are reportedly down, too. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.