Facebook, Instagram down for users due to unidentified issue

Posted Oct 4, 2021 9:36 am.

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – You may have trouble checking your Facebook page or Instagram account after an outage was reported Monday morning.

Facebook, which owns both platforms, as well as the WhatsApp messaging service, has only said it’s aware some users 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,” they said in a statement.

The social media giant did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET. and has lasted five hours so far. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.

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.

— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021

Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down and Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.” Service has not yet been restored.

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food.

The cause of the outage remains unclear.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company, said it appears Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.

Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook’s routing management system could be to blame.

Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case. If that failed, it could be in for “a world of hurt” — because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centers, he added.

“What it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by Internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,” Bellovin tweeted.

Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main Twitter account, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform.

https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1445078208190291973

Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “how much?”

how much? https://t.co/fH0zXw7rV9

— jack (@jack) October 4, 2021

Scores of other Twitter users also took to the platform to complain, commiserate or share a laugh while waiting for what many consider to be the entire internet to get back online.

Mark Zuckerberg trying to fix WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram at the same time #WhatsAppDown pic.twitter.com/KlI9vemxf2

— Lummydee (@Lummydee4) October 4, 2021