It’s not just you: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went offline Monday morning. Facebook said it is aware of the outage, which is also affecting Facebook’s internal tools, according to security journalist Brian Krebs.
Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming said Facebook’s DNS stopped working and noted changes to the company’s BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, described as the “postal service for the internet,” or also “the dark magic of the internet,” as noted by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison.
The outage comes just a day after a 60 Minutes episode revealed the former Facebook product manager who shared internal documents used by The Wall Street Journal in its recent “The Facebook Files” reports. The stories uncovered how Facebook knows “that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.”
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” said the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, on the 60 Minutes episode. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Downdetector shows outages for other non-Facebook platforms including T-Mobile and Amazon. (Update: T-Mobile says its users are being impacted by other third-party application outages). But Twitter seems to be working just fine.
hello literally everyone
— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021
Update, Monday, 1:15 p.m. PT: Facebook CTO Mike Schroeper tweeted Monday afternoon that the company was working as fast as possible to restore service.
*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
Update, Monday, 2:48 p.m PT: Cloudflare published a blog post, “Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet,” describing the situation as if “someone had ‘pulled the cables’ from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.”
“Today’s events are a gentle reminder that the Internet is a very complex and interdependent system of millions of systems and protocols working together,” the blog post notes. “That trust, standardization, and cooperation between entities are at the center of making it work for almost five billion active users worldwide.”
“Facebook can't be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second. Well it can, and here's how. https://t.co/V0fW2n0a4I
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) October 4, 2021
Update, 2:56 p.m.: Facebook said its sites were starting to come back online.
Facebook is coming back after a six-hour outage https://t.co/AhQuUhVqg9 pic.twitter.com/xIW7jEofdN
— The Verge (@verge) October 4, 2021
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry.
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
Update, 11:30 p.m. PT: Facebook published a blog post outlining why the outage happened. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
