Big social media is still in big trouble: Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Facebook Messenger experienced widespread outages Monday morning, and many users around the world can't use some of the most popular sites – Facebook's services. While this isn't unknown, the length of the outage, spanning over an hour at the time of this writing, is very rare – and it's not clear when they'll be back online.
Each of Facebook's apps remain down along with the desktop services for each of Facebook's platforms. DownDetector – a website that tracks outages of online services – shows that each of these services is struggling right now in a variety of territories. There's also reports that services with accounts tied to Facebook logins, like Airbnb and Strava, are not working.
There's currently no way to avoid the issues, so you'll just have to wait until they've been solved to reconnect to WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook. The company is reportedly working on a fix, though it's unclear when they'll be resolved or which will be fixed first.
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We've yet to hear a reason for the outage, but we'll update here when we know more. Facebook's communications executive, Andy Stone, was the first to share an update on Twitter to say the company is aware of the issues and it's currently working on a fix. Shortly thereafter, Facebook's official account acknowledged that users were having trouble accessing the company's apps and products:
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.October 4, 2021
WhatsApp's Twitter account also shared a similar statement on Twitter, beating Facebook's account to acknowledging the issue by minutes:
We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!October 4, 2021
Some users have also reported issues with the company's Oculus virtual reality gaming services. Noted Facebook and Twitter data miner Jane Manchun Wong warned users via tweet not to restart their Oculus devices during the outage lest they lose their games. VR game and software designer Julien Dorra tweeted a video of what it's like to load up Oculus in the midst of the outage:
Facebook brought Oculus down with them 🙁 pic.twitter.com/rfapj1yaSUOctober 4, 2021
Facebook outages: what's going on?
None of the Facebook, Whatsapp, or Instagram accounts have explained what originally caused the outage, leading to speculation and analysis. Brian Krebs of cybersecurity firm Krebs on Security tweeted his conclusion that the DNS records routing traffic to Facebook sites and services were simply withdrawn this morning:
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI 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?October 4, 2021
In a follow-up tweet, Krebs clarified that it's still unclear why the change was made, and could have been erroneously caused by a faulty update.
As AppleInsider noticed, Cloudflare SVP Dane Knecht tweeted an observation that Facebook DNS and other services are down and 'their BGP routes have been withdrawn from the internet.' He noted that Cloudflare also saw its own failures, but a follow-up tweet suggested it was recovering.
"Outages are increasing in volume and can often point towards a cyber-attack, but this can add to the confusion early on when we are diagnosing the causes," said Jake More, expert at cybersecurity and antivirus company ESET, in an emailed comment to TechRadar. "As we saw with Fastly in the summer, web-blackouts are more often originate from undiscovered software bug or even human error."
March and April 2021 saw a major outage where each of Facebook's services affected today – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger – was down for over half an hour each time. It may be a similar issue, as it is impacting the same series of Facebook owned apps and services.
Last time we saw far more services impacted by the outage, and at the time of writing this seems to be limited to just Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook's other services.
Those last outages were due to a bug in the Domain Name System (DNS) of these services, so while we can't say for certain it may be a similar thing again.
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