Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and Gmail are mysteriously down.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for users across the globe at approximately 9 a.m. Pacific time on Monday and have yet returned to function.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are down. Appears to be DNS related.
— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) October 4, 2021
On Sunday, a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. The firm owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
The outages, which are global, appear to have been caused by a server configuration issue. Nearly five hours later, the services remain offline and Facebook has provided no estimate for when they might be restored.
By not having BGP announcements for your DNS name servers, DNS falls apart = nobody can find you on the internet.
Same with WhatsApp btw.
Facebook have basically deplatformed themselves from their own platform.
— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) October 4, 2021
Shortly after the outage occurred, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted that company was working to restore access to its apps. But it’s clearly been a struggle, as four hours later CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted, “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
The Facebook outage is among the worst in recent memory. In 2019, the company’s various services went down for about 24 hours, but only for some people. The company attributed that outage to server configuration issues.
Facebook Has Officially Apologised For The Shut Down on October 4th
To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime. (Updated on Oct. 5, 2021, to reflect the latest information)
People and businesses around the world rely on us every day to stay connected. We understand the impact that outages like these have on people’s lives, as well as our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.
Source: Facebook
