Users reported on social media as of about9:00 P.M. that the various services, all owned by parent company Facebook, were down. Users could not connect to WhatsApp, and the Facebook and Instagram websites were unreachable. The apps of those social media could not be refreshed either. Facebook Messenger was not usable either.
The website downdetector.in received thousands of reports for WhatsApp , Instagram and Facebook . The company itself has not yet responded to the malfunction and its cause.
Update, 9.28 PM: WhatsApp has since confirmed on Twitter that the company is aware of the malfunction, but will not elaborate on the cause. As several tweakers noted in the comments, it seems to be a DNS problem. WhatsApp reports that it is working on a fix and indicates that it will continue to keep users informed. The company does not express expectations about when the outage will be fixed.
Update 2, 11.35 PM : Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht and CTO John Graham-Cumming note on Twitter that all of Facebook’s bgp routes have disappeared from the internet. This border gateway protocol is used to route data over the internet, where the protocol looks up the different possible routes and determines the best route. A Reddit user who claims to work at Facebook claimed in a now-deleted post earlier tonight that the company’s bgp routers are offline. The Redditor states that this was ‘probably’ caused by a configuration change that was implemented shortly before the malfunctions.
Update 3, 2:30 A.M.: The New York Times writes , based on an internal Facebook memo, that the company sent “a small team of employees” to Facebook’s data center in Santa Clara, California to do a “manual reset” of its servers. of the company. According to the American daily, not only the aforementioned services, but also the company’s internal systems, including the company’s communication systems, were affected. Employees who work in the office are also unable to enter the company’s buildings, according to the NYT because their access passes are currently not working. Anonymous employees of Facebook tell the newspaper that it is “unlikely” that it is a cyber attack.
Update 4, 3:00 A.M.: Facebook BGA activity is slowly reappearing, Cloudflare cto Graham-Cumming also notes on Twitter . This may be a signal that they will soon be back online, the CEO writes. Facebook’s status page is now working again; due to the outage, that page was also down earlier. The other Facebook services are not working at the time of writing.
Update 5, 4.00 A.M : The end of the outage seems in sight. It is now possible to send WhatsApp messages again, SkyWayPost has confirmed. The Instagram and Facebook websites are also accessible at times, although they are still slow and not fully functional. Facebook’s status page currently states that the company’s services are offline. The article has been adapted accordingly.
