At around 9.20 pm on Monday, October 4, users across the world reported that they were not able to use Facebook or its WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook. When trying to open WhatsApp, a pop-up message read “Error 5xx”, which means that a problem is likely to have occurred with the platform’s server.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp and Instagram had suffered a major outage. On March 20, Facebook and all its services were down for about 45 minutes, after which they resumed. On Friday, Twitter was filled with news updates and memes about the global WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook outages.

The outage was reportedly caused by a DNS server issue. Downdetector saw a massive spike in reports on the outage, with over 18,349 people facing issues with WhatsApp. Over 12,738 people reported problems while opening Instagram, while over 4,229 people said they were having issues with accessing Facebook.