Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp 'coming back online' after major outages

Facebook said its platform, Instagram and WhatsApp were "coming back online" after a massive outage on Monday knocked out service to the social media giants, taking the sites offline for users across the world.

All three social media giants, owned and operated by Facebook Inc., based in Menlo Park, California, went out of service at 11:39 a.m. ET. By around 6 p.m. ET, users of all three platforms reported that some service had been restored, but full functionality remained elusive well into Monday evening.

Facebook issued a statement at around 6:30 p.m. ET apologizing for the outage and said that its apps and services were being restored.

"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry," Facebook said. "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."

The company has not fully explained what caused the nearly six hour outage.

Earlier on Monday, Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer at Facebook, had to go on Twitter to offer his "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," Schroepfer tweeted just before 4 p.m. ET, over four hours after the outage began.

WhatsApp tweeted: "We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!"

And Instagram took to Twitter and posted the hashtag #instagramdown with the message: "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! "