After an hours-long outage, Facebook and Instagram are back online

Facebook appeared to have resolved networking issues that caused the company’s flagship app to be unavailable for more than six hours on Monday.

According to monitoring service DownDetector, users of Facebook’s sister applications, Instagram and WhatsApp, reported an increase in account access issues around 11:35 a.m. ET Monday—rendering all three applications inoperable.

The company, which has come under fire for allegedly putting profit over safety, acknowledged the outage in a tweet but did not provide an explanation for why its websites and applications were unavailable.

We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

— Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021

After resolving network issues, Facebook apologized via Twitter, posting, “to the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.”

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.

— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021

In a tweet Monday afternoon, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, apologized for the outage, blaming it on unspecified “networking issues.”

*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

— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

The outage occurs just one day after “60 Minutes” aired an interview with a whistleblower who claimed Facebook is aware of how it amplifies hate, misinformation, and unrest but conceals its knowledge.

Facebook has vehemently denied the allegations.