Facebook is suffering a major outage, which has also affected other services produced by the company including Instagram. WhatsApp also appears to have been hit by the problem.
Facebook used rival social media service Twitter to advise people of the issue.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps,” the company posted on Twitter. “We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
In a follow-up tweet Facebook said that the issue was not related to a DDoS attack on its infrastructure.
We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
A statement from a NETSCOUT engineer reportedly attributed the outage to a BGP leak. However, that claim has now been retracted.
Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would work on creating interoperability for the messaging systems of Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger as part of his belief that the future of social networking isn’t in “open platforms” but in private and secure intimate communications.