You are not wrong if you are surfing the network asking why your Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are not responding. The simple answer to that question is because those platforms are completely down for a couple of hours now.

Well, it's strange for the world's most popular social platform to experience such an outage but nothing is impossible under the sun. I wonder what millions of Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram users will be doing right now.

What happened to those social media platforms?

From the information I got, Facebook was hacked and their domain name was also made available for sale while users are being redirected to the wrong locations. The three platforms were heavily affected and need to be shut down to enable them to restore services soonest.

The three applications, all of which are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure, ceased operating altogether soon before 5 p.m. Facebook Workplace and other products from the same family of applications have also ceased operating.

Visitors to the Facebook website were greeted with an error page or a notice stating that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram applications were still functional, but no new information was shown, including messages sent or received during the outage.

Facebook outages are uncommon, but they have a significant impact, not least because they affect three of the world's most popular apps.

The firm is frequently opaque regarding the origins of any problems, and it seldom explains to them even after they have been resolved. It experienced its worst outage in years in 2019, for example, and merely stated that it had "caused a problem" during "regular maintenance operations."

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg stated in a leaked transcript released by The Verge in 2019 that such disruptions are a "huge problem." Any issues can lead to consumers switching to competitors instead, and it might take "months" to re-establish confidence to get them back on Facebook's platforms — if they return at all.

Facebook owner has lost so much money

After a whistleblower came out and outages brought Facebook Inc.'s essential programs down, Mark Zuckerberg's worth dropped by over $7 billion in a matter of hours, pushing him down a rung on the list of the world's wealthiest individuals.

The stock of the social media behemoth fell over 5% on Monday, bringing its total loss to nearly 15% since mid-September.

On Monday, the stock market decline reduced Zuckerberg's net worth to $120.9 billion, putting him behind Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at Top 5. According to the index, he had lost over $19 billion in value since Sept. 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion.

From Instagram's detrimental influence on adolescent girls' mental health to disinformation regarding the Jan. 6 Capitol rioting, The Wall Street Journal revealed on Sept. 13 that Facebook knew about problems with its products while downplaying them publicly. After the reports were public, a whistleblower came forward on Monday.

Facebook has responded by emphasizing that the challenges confronting its products, such as political division, are multifaceted and not only due to technological factors.

Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of worldwide relations, told CNN, "I believe it gives people comfort to feel that there must be a scientific or a technical explanation for the challenges of political polarization in the United States."

bad news for Facebook users

In the wake of Facebook's global outage, its 1.5 billion users' data is now being sold on the dark web.

Data are reportedly being sold on a hacker forum.

According to Sputnik News, a hacker site claimed to have 1.5 billion Facebook users' names, emails, phone numbers, locations, genders, and user IDs. See the original leak report.

“One bidder was quoted $5,000 for 1 million Facebook accounts.

“This values all Facebook user data at $7.5 million.

“The vendor claims to represent a major firm that scrapes Facebook for data.”

Instagram and WhatsApp were down in Nigeria Monday night.

Facebook Inc. said it was restoring the platforms.

Our applications and products are accessible to some users.

“We're striving to bring everything back to normal as soon as possible,” Facebook tweeted.

Instagram also apologized:

« Instagram and friends are currently having problems, and you may be unable to use them. We're working on it!

Facebook, WhatsApp apologized in identical terms:

“We are aware that some users are having problems with WhatsApp right now. We're striving to restore normalcy and will post an update here.