Facebook, What'sApp, Instagram down worldwide for hours

It's not just you — people across the world were reporting having issues using Facebook, Instagram and What'sApp on Monday.

Users began reporting the outage at around 11 a.m., according to DownDetector. The apps came back online around 6 p.m.

Facebook has not yet said what has caused the outage.

The New York Times reports that Facebook's employee badges and phones are also down. It's still unclear what's causing the issues, more than 5 hours later.

Experts are speculating that the issue is coming from Facebook's DNS, or Domain Name System. Facebook engineers were sent to the company's U.S. data centers to try and solve the problems, the Verge reports.

The Gaston Police Department of North Carolina issued a satirical press release, titled, "GPD asking the public for help in locating Facebook and Instagram."

The hashtags #Instagramdown, #Facebookdown and #WhatsAppdown were trending across the world on Twitter. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services saw these trends as an opportunity to promote the COVID-19 vaccine.

"Stop refreshing Facebook and go get your COVID-19 vaccine and flu shot if you haven't already," the department of health wrote on Twitter.

The outage comes a day after the identity of the Facebook whistleblower who released tens of thousands of pages of internal research and documents was made public on 60 minutes.

The 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company says the documents show that Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that the company has tried to hide that evidence, CNN reports.

A bombshell Wall Street Journal article posted last week revealed that Facebook's internal research indicated the platform was harming teenage girls.

CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerburg lost $6 billion of personal wealth in a few hours, knocking him down on the list of the world's richest people.