Including Instagram and WhatsApp
Facebook’s behind some of the most popular online destinations around, and beyond Facebook itself, it also runs Instagram and WhatsApp. One big problem there is that when everything’s being hosted on the same servers, a company-wide outage can potentially disrupt the usage of all of these apps and services. Today, that has happened. It’s not just you — all Facebook services are currently down around the globe.
DownDetector notes that people started reporting outages on a handful of Facebook-owned services starting around 11:30 AM Eastern. Services currently affected include Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook across both the web and mobile.
Facebook acknowledged the outage shortly after reports started dripping in, but despite this early acknowledgement, the outage lasted throughout the whole day. The outage was DNS-related.
According to Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s VP, all the BGP routes for Facebook’s servers were pulled, essentially making all Facebook services disappear from the Internet. Speculation has pointed to a borked BGP route update made by a Facebook engineer this morning as being the likely cause behind all this.
Facebook services started coming back for some people at around 5:40 PM Eastern, meaning that the outage lasted a grand total of 6 hours. Plenty of users are still reporting various issues when trying to get into Facebook services, but with DNS issues being resolved, it should only be a matter of time before they’re all fully operational again.
UPDATE: 2021/10/04 18:15 EST BY AROL WRIGHT
Coming back
Facebook services have started to come back, and this story has been updated to reflect that. We’ve also added additional details on what caused today’s massive Facebook outage.
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