smartbusinessinfohubFacebook, Instagram Messenger and WhatsApp went offline for users across the globe, the social media giant said on Monday, as hours later it scrambled to restore the services after being hit by one of its longest outages.
The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other related products, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace, have also stopped working.
At time of writing, it is unclear what has caused the issue although the company has suffered outages before.
The outage began around noon and service had yet to be restored more than four hours later.
On Sunday, a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. The firm owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. Facebook itself controls the relevant settings, suggesting the problem was an internal one.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
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An outside hack was viewed as less likely.
A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique, security experts said.
Downdetector – which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform – showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.
Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.
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“If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal,” puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account.
Inside Facebook, the outage has broken nearly all of the internal systems employees use to communicate and work. Several employees told The Verge they’ve resorted to talking through their work-provided Outlook email accounts, though employees can’t receive emails from external addresses. Employees who were logged into work tools such as Google Docs and Zoom before the outage can still use those, but any employee who needs to login with their work email is blocked.
Facebook engineers have been sent to the company’s U.S. data centers to try and fix the problem, according to two people familiar with the situation. That means the outage, already Facebook’s most severe in years, could be further prolonged.
The outage is affecting every Facebook-owned platform, according to data on Downdetector and Twitter. This includes Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. The outages appear to have started around 11:40 am ET/8:40 am PT and all of those services remain inaccessible.
The outages quickly started trending on Twitter as users flocked to the competing social network to check to see if other users were affected by the down time. Humorously, the hashtag “#DeleteFacebook” is also trending on Twitter as the company battles continued pushback against the effects its platforms have on younger users.
As the New York Times reports:
Facebook has already been dealing with plenty of scrutiny. The company has been under fire from a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who amassed thousands of pages of internal research and has since distributed them to the news media, lawmakers and regulators. The documents revealed that Facebook knew of many harms that its services were causing.
While some Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages only affect certain geographic regions, the services are down worldwide today. This includes the United States, the UK, Brazil, Kuwait, and more.
The outage is also affecting platforms and services that use Facebook login. Niantic, creator of Pokémon GO, says that it is “looking into reports of errors associated with Facebook login, and will update here once we have more information.” Other services that also use Facebook login are believed to be affected, as well as Oculus.
Potential explanation
Cybercrime reporter Brian Krebs attributes it to a major DNS problem. Krebs explains that the DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook and Instagram “got withdrawn this morning from the global routing cables.” At this point, however, it’s unclear how this happened.
Krebs writes in a blog post:
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.
In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that even Facebook isn’t entirely sure what the root cause of this issue is:
Several hours into the incident, Facebook’s security experts were still trying to identify the root issue, according to an internal memo and employees briefed on the matter. Two members of its security team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said it was unlikely that a cyberattack had taken place because one hack was unlikely to affect so many apps at once.
WhatsApp statement
In a statement, WhatsApp acknowledges that its service is down:
We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.
Facebook statement
Facebook’s Andy Stone:
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.
Facebook internal also affected
Facebook’s internal Workplace site and associated services for employees are also suffering from an outage today, according to Jane Manchun Wong. The company has distributed a memo to employees about the issues. Employees are referring to this as a “snow day,” including Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.
The New York Times report says that virtually everything inside Facebook is broken, including the ability to use keycards for entering buildings, security systems, an internal calendar and scheduling tools, and more. The Verge reports that Facebook employees have turned to platforms like Discord and FaceTime for communication.
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Facebook’s shares had already plunged sharply as trading began on Monday, probably because of other ongoing criticism in the wake of allegations shared by a whistleblower who previously worked at the company.
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