Facebook‘s whole network of services fell down just as Antigone Davis was live on CNBC
defending the business over a whistleblower’s allegations and its management of research evidence
indicating Instagram is detrimental to teenagers.
The disruption began just before noon ET and lasted almost six hours to fix. This is Facebook‘s biggest
outage since a 2019 incident knocked the site down for more than 24 hours, wreaking havoc for small
companies and artists who depend on these services for a living.
At 5:30 p.m. ET, after failing all tests for most of the day,
a DNSchecker.org test of ISP DNS servers revealed that the majority of them had successfully found a route to Facebook.com.
We were able to resume regular use of Facebook and Instagram a few minutes later; however, the DNS
repairs may take some time to reach everyone.
Facebook communications executive Andy Stone said on Twitter, “We’re aware that some users are
experiencing difficulty accessing our applications and products.” We are working hard to restore
normalcy as soon as possible, and we regret any inconvenience.” ‘Mike Schroepfer, who will resign as CTO
next year’, tweeted, “We are having networking problems and our team are working as quickly as can to diagnose and restore.”
Nearly all of Facebook‘s internal communication and work processes have been disrupted as a result of the outage.
also, read more / Who is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen?
Several workers told The Verge that they communicated via their company’s Outlook email accounts,
despite the fact that employees can’t receive emails from outside addresses. Employees who were signed
into work products like Google Docs and Zoom before the outage may continue to use them, but anybody
who needs to log in with their work email has been banned.
According to ‘two individuals familiar ‘ with the matter, Facebook engineers have been sent to the
company’s US data centers to attempt to resolve the issue. This meant that the outage, which was already
the worst in years for Facebook, might be extended much longer.
A quick look at Down Detector (or your Twitter feed) shows that the issues were widespread. While it’s
unclear why the platforms were unavailable for so many users, their DNS records indicate that like with
last week’s Slack outage, the issue is probably DNS (it’s always DNS).
Dane Knecht, senior vice president of Cloudflare, observes that Facebook‘s border gateway protocol
routes – BGP lets networks choose the optimal method to transmit internet data — were abruptly
“withdrawn from the internet.” While some have hypothesized about hackers or an internal protest over
yesterday night’s whistleblower revelation, there is no evidence that anything nefarious is to blame.
Instagram.com displayed a 5xx Server Error notice, while the Facebook site simply said that something had gone wrong.
also read more / Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus VR are all unavailable.
The issue also impacted Oculus, the company’s virtual reality subsidiary. Users could load previously
loaded games, and the browser worked, but social functions and the installation of new games did not.
update 5 p.m. ET, October 4th: The outage is still continuing, and they added more information regarding the 2019 outage
4:45 p.m. ET, October 4th: Internal Facebook updates have been included, as well as a statement from
Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer.
5 p.m. ET, October 4th: The outage is still continuing, and information regarding the 2019 outage has been added.
Update, October 4th, 5:35 PM ET: DNS updates indicate that Facebook is nearing a solution.
Facebook.com is back as of October 4th, 6:08 PM ET.
