Facebook returns after nearly six-hour outage

After a nearly six-hour outage, Facebook appears to be reconnected to the global internet, Cloudflare reported Monday afternoon. The affected services may take more time to recover. 

The flagship Facebook app, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Oculus services, all suffered a global outage beginning at around 11:44 am EDT. The social media giant's platforms went down because there was no working Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into Facebook's sites. BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). 

According to Cloudflare, Facebook was reconnected as of 5:28 pm EDT. 

The outage inspired countless jokes and hot takes on Twitter and other corners of the internet that aren't part of the Facebook empire:

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