BY J. CLARA CHAN | HollywoodReporter.Com

Troy Warren for CNT #Digital

“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” the outgoing CTO said on Monday afternoon.

Facebook’s chief technology officer apologized on Monday afternoon after Facebook’s suite of applications, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, remained offline for several hours around the globe.

“Facebook services coming back online now — may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s outgoing CTO, tweeted late on Monday afternoon.

A few hours earlier, Schroepfer said the company was experiencing “networking issues” and that Facebook’s teams were “working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

The Facebook applications first began displaying error messages early on Monday morning, with a spike in users reporting outages beginning after 8 a.m. PT, according to Downdetector. It wasn’t until late Monday afternoon, around 3:30 p.m. PT, that Facebook announced its apps and services were returning online. The company has not yet offered a clear explanation for the cause of the global outages.

Facebook’s most recent major outage took place in 2019, when apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for nearly 24 hours. At the time, representative for Facebook pointed to a “server configuration change” as the cause of the problem.