Facebook services seem to be slowly coming back online after one of the biggest outages in recent memory. Facebook, Instagram and Messenger’s apps appear to be working again, though the websites are loading more slowly than usual. Meanwhile, WhatsApp’s website seems to be back, but the app is still having issues connecting.
As of 6:05pm ET Monday, the “Facebook for Business Status” page was still showing “major disruptions,” to the social network’s core services. But that was still an improvement from earlier in the day when the website was offline entirely.
Facebook didn’t immediately comment or elaborate on the cause of the outage. In an earlier tweet, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Schroepfer, cited “networking issues.”
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
The outage lasted more than six hours, taking down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus. It also wreaked havoc on the company internally, with employees reportedly unable to access emails, Workplace and other tools. The New York Times that employees were also physically locked out of offices as workers’ badges stopped working.
It also shaved off of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth as Facebook’s stock tanked, Bloomberg reported. Elsewhere, the company is still reeling from the fallout of a whistleblower who has accused the company of prioritizing The whistleblower was The Wall Street Journal’s primary source for several articles that details how Instagram is harmful to teens and the company’s controversial program that allows high profile users to break its rules.
Security reporter Brian Krebs reported the outage was linked to issues with Facebook’s BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) records, which prevented the company’s services from being accessible. He later added it was “a routine BGP update gone wrong.” DNS provider Cloudflare also cited BGP as the likely culprit, writing in a blog post that it was “as if someone had ‘pulled the cables’ from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.”
Developing…
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