Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp suffer global outage

Facebook Inc's suite of apps, including popular photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, were hit by a massive outage on Monday impacting millions of users worldwide.

In Pakistan, within minutes, #Facebook, #WhatsApp became the top trends on Twitter as users took to the platform to inquire whether the services were down.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said the services have been affected internationally.

"Further details are being collected," tweeted the PTA.

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com confirmed several thousand users were affected.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the services. However, the error message on Facebook's webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

Facebook chooses 'profit over safety,' says whistleblower

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

Meanwhile, the social-media giant's instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down along with Messenger.

WhatsApp was also trending on Twitter Inc, with more than 850,000 tweets.

"We're aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment," the messaging platform's official Twitter handle said. "We're working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible."

“We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter.

"We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience," he said.

Whistleblower set to testify

The outage comes a day after a whistleblower went on US television to reveal her identity after she leaked a trove of documents to authorities alleging the company knew its products were fueling hate and harming children's mental health.

Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest, but said in an interview with CBS news show "60 Minutes" that Facebook was "substantially worse" than anything she had seen before.

The world's largest social media platform has been embroiled in a firestorm brought about by Haugen, with US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal raising sharp criticism of the network.

"I think that finally now policymakers, maybe the White House, other leaders can look at someone like Frances Haugen and say... 'It's now incumbent upon us, Facebook will not fix itself,'" said Nora Benavidez, a Facebook accountability expert.

Facebook's vice president of policy and global affairs Nick Clegg vehemently pushed back at the assertion its platforms are "toxic" for teens, days after a tense, hours-long congressional hearing in which US lawmakers grilled the company over its impact on the mental health of young users.

Haugen, the whistleblower, is herself set to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill over Facebook and Instagram's impact on young people.

Senators put the social media giant's Antigone Davis through the wringer last week over damning reports that Facebook's own research warned of potential harm.

Davis told lawmakers that a survey of teens on 12 serious issues like anxiety, sadness and eating disorders showed that Instagram was generally helpful to them.

Yet, Senator Richard Blumenthal read aloud excerpts from company documents he said were leaked to lawmakers by a Facebook whistleblower that directly contradicted her.

"Substantial evidence suggests that experiences on Instagram and Facebook make body dissatisfaction worse," he said, adding the finding was not a disgruntled worker's complaint but company research.

The enterprise has been under relentless pressure to guard against being a platform where misinformation, hate and child-harming content can spread.

Legislators have struggled to pass new rules that would update online protections in decades-old laws crafted long before social media even existed.