There’s another major outage across multiple services. The most prominent social media platforms are in huge trouble: Many customers worldwide are trying to utilize some of the most popular sites – Facebook’s services – due to widespread outages on Monday morning.
Each of these apps and the desktop services for each of Facebook’s platforms have issues. In addition, DownDetector, a website that detects internet service failures, also shows that each of these services is now experiencing problems in various locations.
Because there’s no way to escape the problems, for now, you’ll have to wait until they’re resolved before reconnecting to WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook. The corporation is allegedly working on a repair, although it is unknown when it will be completed or which issues will be addressed first. Unfortunately, we haven’t received word on what’s causing the outage, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do.
Andy Stone, a Facebook communications officer, was the first to update Twitter, stating that the business is aware of the issues and is working on a solution. Following that, Facebook’s official account said that customers were having difficulties accessing the company’s apps and products:
WhatsApp’s Twitter account made a similar remark on Twitter, minutes before Facebook’s account acknowledged the problem.
Some users have also complained about problems with the company’s virtual reality gaming service, Oculus. Jane Manchun Wong, a well-known Facebook and Twitter data miner, issued a tweet warning users not to restart their Oculus devices during the downtime for fear of losing their games. Julien Dorra, a VR game and software creator, shared a video of what it’s like to load up Oculus during the outage:
What’s causing the Facebook outages?
The fact that none of the Facebook, Whatsapp, or Instagram accounts have stated what caused the outage has sparked discussion and analysis. The DNS records sending traffic to Facebook sites and services were simply revoked this morning, according to Brian Krebs of cybersecurity firm Krebs on Security:
Krebs clarified that it’s still unclear why the change was made in a follow-up tweet 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SVP Dane Knecht tweeted an observation that Facebook DNS and other services are down and ‘their BGP routes are withdrawn from the internet.’ In addition, he noted that Cloudflare also saw its 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, an 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 an undiscovered software bug or even human error.”
March and April 2021 saw a significant 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, 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 these services’ Domain Name System (DNS), so it may be similar again, while we can’t say for sure.