No, it’s not just your internet connection..
Facebook and Instagram are indeed facing widespread outages.
The downtime isn’t only affecting the social network and the photo sharing service either. Users are experiencing issues with the company’s other platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as well, according to Downdetector.
Workplace, Facebook’s internal communications platform, is effected by the downtime as well. Facebook employees told the New York Times that it was difficult to get work done in the company without Workplace, equating today to a “snow day.”
(Note: Mashable’s publisher, Ziff Davis, owns DownDetector. Mashable’s parent company, J2, uses Workplace for internal communications as well.)
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These outages come just one day after a bombshell 60 Minutes interview with current Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who was unveiled to be the whistleblower behind a trove of leaked documents detailing public safety issues with the company.
The hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown are currently trending on Twitter.
Mashable will update this piece with a response from Facebook about what caused the downtime.
UPDATE: Oct. 4, 2021, 12:17 p.m. EDT Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone tweeted an update saying that the company is “aware” of the issue causing outages to its products and they are working to fit it.
UPDATE: Oct. 4, 2021, 1:13 p.m. EDT According to Cloudflare Senior Vice President Dane Knecht, it appears Facebook is facing DNS issues.
Knecht explained on Twitter that Facebook’s “DNS and other services are down” and its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes have been “withdrawn from the internet.”
BGP is essentially a system that chooses the most efficient ways to route internet traffic.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) provider that basically makes sure many of the internet’s top website’s are reliably and quickly accessible. But, when Cloudflare or similar services have issues, it/s noticeable because often times it takes out many popular sites down with it.
UPDATE: Oct. 4, 2021, 1:37 p.m. EDT Added information about Workplace facing downtime as well.
