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MENLO PARK, United States (AP) - Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were down across wide swathes of the world yesterday, with Facebook's internal systems used by employees also going down.The company said it was aware that "some people are having trouble accessing [the] Facebook app" and it was working on restoring access.Regarding the internal failures, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tweeted that it feels like a "snow day".The company did not say what might have caused the outage, which began around 11:45 ET. It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York and Europe.Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik Inc, said it appears that the routes Facebook advertises online that tell the entire Internet how to reach its properties was not available. He said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world had been withdrawn. The domain name system (DNS) is an integral element of how traffic on the Internet is routed. DNS translates an address like " facebook.com" to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook's DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.Facebook is going through a separate major crisis after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company's awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions. Haugen went public on 60 Minutes on Sunday.Haugen also anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement alleging that Facebook's own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarisation, and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls' mental health.The Journal's stories, called The Facebook Files, painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests over the public good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company's vice-president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo last Friday that "social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out".Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company's main Twitter account, posting "Hello, literally everyone" as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform.