Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms suffered a worldwide outage Monday that has extended more than three hours.
Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down. Service has since been restored.
The company did not say what might be causing the outage. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hourslong global disruptions are rare.
The impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties.
It also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure.
