What caused Facebook, Instagram outage?

Social media platforms Facebook and Instagram faced a worldwide outage on Monday reportedly due to a "system-wide change".

Independent investigative journalist, Brian Krebs, took to Twitter and wrote: "The DNS records that tell systems how to find http://Facebook.com or http://Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables."

Krebs added: "Can you imagine working at FB right now when your email no longer works [and] all your internal FB-based tools fail?"

However, the journalist also mentioned that the details are yet to be revealed. He said: "We don't know why this change was made. It could well have been the result of an internal, system-wide change or update that went awry."

"It is all speculation at this point why [Facebook] alone is in control over its DNS records," he maintained.

After thousands of users reported that they were not able to access the platforms, the three platforms, taking to their Twitter handle, responded to the complaints.

WhatsApp tweeted that it is working to resolve the issue and asked users to be patient.

"We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!"

After WhatsApp tweeted about its outage, Facebook followed suit and tweeted: "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing the Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

Meanwhile, the picture-sharing app Instagram also took to its Twitter handle and said: "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! #instagramdown."