Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Experience Global Outages
Mon 8:39 pm +00:00, 4 Oct 2021Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Experience Global Outages
ZeroHedge
Update
Facebook appears to have more than DNS issues, as NYT’s Sheera Frenkel reports:
“Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.”
This may suggest Facebook’s internal systems are down. DNS issues that affect the website don’t hinder employees from entering buildings.
***
Update (1448ET): It’s been several hours, and Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger, are still down. According to internet researchers, Facebook appears to be dealing with a Domain Name System (DNS) issue.
Internet security researcher Brian Krebs tweeted:
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook.com or Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
To be more precise (and Geek Factor 5) the BGP routes serving Facebook’s authoritative DNS were withdrawn, rendering all Facebook domains inaccessible. That’s per @DougMadory , who knows a few things about BGP/DNS.
Searching for Facebook’s DNS records comes up empty-handed.
NBC News’ Kevin Collier called the DNS issues at Facebook “really bad.”
Meanwhile, everyone on Twitter..
***
Downdector reports that Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger are experiencing issues and /or outages worldwide. The outage comes just before a Facebook whistleblower is set to testify before Congress on Tuesday. On the bright side, with a broad part of social media platforms down today, maybe people will get back to work and boost global productivity since the outage is broad.
Users began to report issues with the social media platform around 1120 ET.
Facebook users report the website won’t load with an error message that reads:
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged on Twitter that “some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.”
The timing of the widespread outages comes as a Facebook whistleblower will be testifying before Congress on Tuesday. The whistleblower appeared on “60 Minutes” Sunday, detailing the tech company’s mission to put profit before doing “what was good for the public,” including clamping down on hate speech.
Shares of the tech company slid 6% by early afternoon, tumbling not just on the whistleblower but also the global outage.
Facebook users took to Twitter to complain about the outages: