Global Facebook outage resolved after hours
Instagram and WhatsApp also back online - still no explanation from company
YUMA, Ariz. (KYMA, KECY) - Social media giant Facebook came back online Monday afternoon after a worldwide outage knocked out Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than five hours.
Facebook took to Twitter just after 8:30 MST Monday morning to alert users to the issue:
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Instagram sent this message to its users around the same time:
Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 4, 2021
Three hours later Facebook retweeted this post from Mike Schroepfer, its chief technical officer:
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Websites and apps often suffer outages of different sizes and durations, but global outages lasting this long are extremely rare. The last major internet outage, in June, knocked many of the world's top websites offline, but that lasted less than an hour.
The cause of the service disruption remains unclear. Facebook hasn't offered an explanation yet. Experts say it looks like the company withdrew the routes that allow the internet to communicate with various properties.
"The DNS service that Facebook operates in order to translate things like Facebook.com to a numeric sequence that a computer can go and fetch files from - that DNS translation is not working because Facebook's DNS services are inaccessible." says Doug Madory, the Director of Internet Analysis for Kentik Inc.
Jake Williams, chief technical officer for the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, says foul play cannot be completely ruled out. However, Williams says it's more likely human error is to blame for the "operational issue." Madory agrees.
"I am cautious to assign any kind of malicious activity to these things because a lot of times, more often than not, it turns out that there was an internal slip up that caused the outage," he says.
Madory says there's no sign any entity but Facebook is responsible.
"Nobody's immune. There's no company that's immune from an outage. So at all times, these engineers need to be doing things like this, looking at other other companies that have gone down, understand why. How did that happen and how they can learn from that improve their own processes?" he says.
The outage comes amid a separate crisis for the social media giant. On Sunday night a former Facebook product manager provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents exposing the company's awareness of the detrimental impacts of its products and decisions. Whistleblower Frances Haugen also appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday. She'll testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
