Tech

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram back online after a massive outage

Published

3 years ago

October 4, 2021

Facebook is back online after a massive outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have started to come back online after being down for more than six hours in a major outage..

The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other related products, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace, have also stopped working.

Facebook and Instagram began working for users again at around 11pm, while WhatsApp remained still down.

In June and April this year, the social media giant’s platforms unexpectedly went down due to a “network configuration issue”.

Just as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, its entire network of services suddenly went offline.

The outage started just before noon ET and took nearly six hours before it was resolved. This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours, as the downtime hit hardest on the small businesses and creators who rely on these services for their income.

After failing all tests for most of the day, a test of ISP DNS servers via DNSchecker.org showed most of them successfully finding a route to Facebook.com at 5:30PM ET. A few minutes later, we were able to start using Facebook and Instagram normally, however, it may take time for the DNS fixes to reach everyone.

On Twitter, Facebook communications exec Andy Stone says, “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.” Mike Schroepfer, who will step down from his post as CTO next year, tweeted, “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

Inside Facebook, the outage has broken nearly all of the internal systems employees use to communicate and work. Several employees told The Verge they resorted to talking through their work-provided Outlook email accounts, though employees can’t receive emails from external addresses. Employees who were logged into work tools such as Google Docs and Zoom before the outage can still use those, but any employee who needs to login with their work email was blocked.

Facebook engineers have been sent to the company’s U.S. data centers to try and fix the problem, according to two people familiar with the situation. That meant the outage, already Facebook’s most severe in years could be further prolonged.