San Francisco, CA - A massive outage has hit Facebook-owned social networks and caused hours of downtime for the social media giant. On Twitter, John Graham-Cumming, the CTO for Cloudflare said the problem was likely with Facebook’s authoritative DNS servers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp.

About five minutes before Facebook's DNS stopped working we saw a large number of BGP changes (mostly route withdrawals) for Facebook's ASN. @jgrahmc

Outages are fairly common amongst large applications on the modern internet. But they are usually very brief or localized to a singular region or application. Huge swathes of a company's sites going down, however, is much less common. It's unclear how Facebook is responding to the outage aside from working to resolve it as soon as possible, of course. While there are internal concerns about lost revenue and dissatisfied users, a source close to the matter said that:

"the real concern is about all the misinformation not getting out there. Think about the millions of people looking for confirmation that everyone else is wrong, the outrage they're missing out on right now, or the corrosive clickbait they could be consuming...Truly a shame. We need to do better. And we will."