WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram are back online: Mark Zuckerberg

Services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are coming back online after several hours of disruption that impacted millions of people worldwide.

The users of the three social media platforms remained clueless as they repeatedly received error messages for most part of the day.

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed on Facebook. 

Meanwhile, shares of Facebook fell 4.9%, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday..

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. 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,” Facebook, which owns photo sharing app Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp, said on Twitter.

The outage Monday appeared to be related to Facebook’s DNS, or domain name system, records. Put simply, DNS converts domain names like “facebook.com” to the actual internet protocol addresses of the corresponding website. 

An error in DNS records can make it impossible to connect to a website. Facebook has had to physically reset some of the company’s servers in an effort to fix the problem.