(Story by Beaver County Radio News Correspondent Curtis Walsh)

Users around the world tried to reset their internet connection and restart their devices Monday morning when they couldn’t access Facebook.  A global outage occurred shortly before noon that left Facebook and their other owned platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, inaccessible to both users and the company itself.  Facebook released a statement on Twitter saying “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”  It is currently unclear what caused the outage.  The sites appeared back online around 6pm Monday with some limited functionality.  This came a day after a TV segment was aired about Facebook being under allegations of knowingly spreading violence and misinformation. Stocks for the company plummeted 5% Monday morning shortly before the outage as well. Have no fear, you can always get all your Beaver County news right here on beavercountyradio.com.