Facebook-Owned Apps Back Online After Experiencing Worst Worldwide Outage Since 2008: 'We're Sorry'

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are back up and running after going offline Monday morning for several hours.

The Facebook-owned apps were back online by around 6 p.m. ET.

"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry," Facebook tweeted shortly after its products were restored. "We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us."

Monday's crash marked the worst outage for Facebook since 2008 when a bug caused Facebook to be offline for nearly a day, according to CNBC, which also reported that there was an hour-long outage back in 2019 when Facebook blamed the issue on a server configuration change.

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"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook said in a statement on Twitter, which was not affected by any outage.

DownDetector, a website that tracks real-time outage information, reported Facebook had thousands of reported outages from users since before noon ET.

"*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible," Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted after the outage was nearing its fourth hour.

So far, Facebook has yet to say that caused the hours-long outage.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, two Facebook employees told The New York Times on Monday that "it was unlikely that a cyberattack caused the issues."

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Experts at ThousandEyes, a company that monitors network infrastructure and troubleshoots app delivery, said on Twitter that it believes, "the Facebook application became unreachable due to DNS [Domain Name System] failure."

Facebook and Instagram quickly became trending topics with Twitter even trolling the tech giant, tweeting, "hello, literally everyone."