UPDATE: October 5, 2021, 5 :24 p.m. AEDT Facebook posted a short post explaining the outage. It stated that "We want to be clear at this point we believe the root cause was a faulty configure change." We don't have any evidence that user data was compromised by this downtime. Although the post did not provide any concrete information about the incident, it offered some explanations and apologies to "all those who were affected".
UPDATE: October 5, 2021, 11 :52 a.m. ET Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are now back online after a six hour outage. However, it all depends on your perspective as to whether or not this is a good thing. As expected, there have been mixed reactions.
UPDATE: October 4, 2021 at 5:47 PM EDT Facebook finally brings some of its platforms online. Users are reporting that Facebook's and Instagram's websites are now working properly and that newsfeeds are loading again.
Cloudflare just published a deep dive explanation into what happened to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp today.
The original story is here...
It's more than your internet connection.
Facebook and Instagram are experiencing widespread outages.
The social network and photo sharing site are also affected by the downtime. According to Downdetector, users are also experiencing problems with other platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
The downtime also affects Workplace, Facebook’s internal communications platform. According to Facebook employees, it was difficult for them to work in their company without Workplace. This is equivalent to today being a "snowday."
(Note: DownDetector is owned by Ziff Davis, Mashable's publisher. Mashable's parent company J2 uses Workplace to manage internal communications.
SEE ALSO: To find the fastest VPN, we tested several popular VPNs. Here are the results.
These outages occur just one day following a 60 Minutes bombshell interview with Frances Haugen, a current Facebook employee. She was revealed to be the whistleblower behind leaked documents that detail public safety concerns with the company.
Twitter is currently trending with the hashtags #FacebookDown & #InstagramDown
Mashable will update the article with a response by Facebook regarding the cause of the downtime.
UPDATE: October 4, 2021, 5 :17 p.m. ET If you believe it, Facebook, and all its platforms, are still down completely.
According to NetBlocks today's outage is the "most severe Facebook outage ever recorded."
This organization monitors internet rights and governance and estimates that $160 million of global economic losses are caused by each hour that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are down.
Bloomberg reports that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and founder, has lost $7 billion as a result of a selloff in the stock market.
Don't believe any reports that Facebook is experiencing downtime due to hacking or other malicious causes. The reason seems to be server-related.
According to the New York Times Facebook sent a small team to California to reset its servers manually.
This issue affects Facebook's email, internet communication tools and may also prevent employees from entering the office because the badge system isn't working.
Cloudflare senior vice president Dane Knecht said that Facebook faces DNS problems.
Knecht stated on Twitter that Facebook's DNS and other services were down and that its Border Gateway Protocol routes (BGP), have been "withdrawn" from the internet.
Mashable was informed by Usman Muzaffar (SVP Engineering at Cloudflare), about the following statement:
We discovered that Facebook's service was still unavailable this morning. It is not Cloudflare related and our systems work normally. This was a problem we noticed immediately as we are one of the largest DNS resolvers in the world. The Domain Name System (DNS), is the Internet's phonebook. Domain names like facebook.com allow humans to access online information. DNS converts this into numbers that computers use, which is called an IP address.
According to what we know, the issue is a globalized BGP configuration problem. These are usually mistakes and not attacks, according to our experience.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is the Internet's routing protocol. BGP, much like the post office that processes mail, chooses the best routes to deliver Internet traffic. The directions to reach Facebook's DNS servers addresses were not available today and seem to be still unavailable. Visitors trying to reach Facebook properties like facebook.com won't be able to contact them and the page will not load.
UPDATE: October 4, 2021, 12 :17 p.m. ET Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone tweeted an update stating that the company was "aware" of the problem causing outages in its products and that they are trying to fix it.
