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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for hours on Monday, Facebook said, adding that “networking issues” were the cause of the outage.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook said in a tweet.

Shortly after the outages were reported, Facebook shares fell more than 5 percent. Reuters reported that Facebook’s shares were “inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.”

“*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,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted.

Amazon Web Services and US mobile phone companies also reported being down, according to Downdetector, a website which provides outage information.

Users later reported that Twitter was having issues.

Security experts tracking the situation said the outage likely was triggered by a configuration error that left directions to Facebook servers unavailable. That could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most popular sites, on the other hand, would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.

One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down. Facebook's response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said.

Multiple employees said they had not been told what had gone wrong.

The social media giant, which is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

Twitter jokes

McDonald’s and Twitter made light of the situation with an interaction of tweets.

Twitter also pushed out a tweet reading: “hello literally everyone.”

*Agencies