Facebook, Instagram, and other services seeing widespread outage [u]

Credit: Brett Jordan/Unsplash

Facebook and its various services — including Instagram and WhatsApp — are currently experiencing a widespread outage that is seemingly being caused by DNS problems.

Reports first started surfacing around 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (8:30 a.m. Pacific), according to Down Detector. The outage appears widespread, with 126,352 reports of an issue by 11:58 a.m. It isn't just Facebook's main site that is being affected, either. Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus VR appear down, too.

The social media giant acknowledged the issue around 12:16 p.m., stating that they're "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible."

We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021

The exact cause of the issue isn't known, but seems to be related to DNS. Around noon Eastern time on Monday, a Cloudflare executive said that it appears that Facebook's BGP routes have been "withdrawn from the internet."

Update: Facebook's services returned after an approximately six-hour outage.

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18 Comments

buttesilver

said about 2 years ago

Can you say data scrub? Yeah, that's all it is. Time to revamp the culling of info to meet the narratives.

pulseimages

said about 2 years ago

It’s a giant PITA!

robin huber

said about 2 years ago

Thought it was my lousy Spectrum service.

Xed

said about 2 years ago

buttesilver said:

Can you say data scrub? Yeah, that's all it is. Time to revamp the culling of info to meet the narratives.

Even when your conspiracy gateways are offline you're still finding a way to keep the momentum going.

zimmie

said about 2 years ago

It's actually a BGP issue. They advertise around 5000 prefixes into public BGP. A few hours ago, they stopped advertising around a thousand of those prefixes. It seems the prefixes they are no longer advertising contain most (possibly all) of their authoritative DNS servers. Even though a lot of their systems are still up, nothing can get to the DNS servers to find them.

For extra fun, their internal communication platform is a separate instance of Facebook ... which is also inaccessible. People are speculating it's an attack, but if you're making a change remotely, and it takes out both your remote access and your ability to coordinate with others on the team, four hours or more is commonly the best case recovery time.

Edit: Just heard (and second-sourced) that their badge access to buildings also isn't working. They take physical security pretty seriously. You can't just call a locksmith to pick the lock. It's looking likely this will last 12+ hours. I really feel for their IT operators.