Facebook said its platform, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, were coming back online after a massive outage on Monday knocked out service to all three social media giants and took the sites offline for users across the world. All three platforms — owned and operated by Facebook Inc. based in Menlo Park, California — went out of service at 11:39 a.m. ET.  At approcimately 6 p.m. ET, all three platforms reported that some service had been restored, but full functionality may remain erratic well into Monday evening. Facebook issued a statement at around 6:30 p.m. ET apologizing for the outage and said that its apps and services were being restored.  Facebook said on Twitter: “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.”

Earlier on Monday, Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer at Facebook, went on Twitter just before 4 p.m. ET to offer his “sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.” WhatsApp tweeted: “We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!” And Instagram took to Twitter and posted the hashtag #instagramdown with the message: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! “

The company has not fully explained what caused the over six hour outage, only blaming “networking issues.” The outage comes a day after Facebook faced allegations from a whistleblower that it had turned a blind eye to disinformation that led to the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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