Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram come back online after widespread outage

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are starting to come back online after a generalized failure lasted more than six hours on Monday, disrupting communications for the company’s roughly 3 billion users.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: We are sorry. We have worked hard to restore access to our applications and services and are happy to announce that they are coming back online. now. Thanks for supporting with us, ”Facebook said in a Tweeter.

The three social networks – all owned by Facebook – started having problems around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector, a crowdsourcing website that tracks outages online.

The company admitted that it was having issues shortly after noon ET, saying in a tweet from its WhatsApp account that it “was working to get things back to normal and would send an update here as soon as possible.” Similar posts were shared on Facebook’s Twitter accounts and Facebook Messenger.

Hours later, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said in a tweet that the company was “having network problems” and was working as fast as possible to “debug and restore” its services.

The blackout – and the resulting reaction on Twitter – underscores both our addiction to social media and the love-hate relationship it inspires. Not being able to post on Facebook or Instagram has been as much frustration as it is relief, with some relishing the break from being constantly connected to our digital lives. Ironically, it is these same social media platforms that allow us to express our collectively mixed feelings about the situation.

* Sincere * apologies to all who are currently affected by the outages in Facebook services. We are having network issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as quickly as possible

– Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

Blackouts are nothing new to the online world, and services often go offline or experience slowdowns. Facebook’s outage on Monday, however, was unusual in that it hit a suite of the company’s products, including its central site and WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service widely used around the world. Facebook is deeply entangled in the global infrastructure, and the outage has disrupted communications for the company’s billions of users. The website and its services are used for everything from informal discussions to business transactions.

It is not immediately clear what caused the problem for the three properties. Security expert Brian Krebs said so seems to be a DNS related issue, adding that something “has prompted the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other internet-connected devices how to find these destinations online.”

Cloudflare, a content delivery network that hosts customer data for quick access around the world, had its own explanation of what could have happened.

“Facebook and its sites had effectively disconnected from the Internet,” Cloudflare concluded. “It was as if someone had ‘pulled the cables’ from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.

Facebook’s problem involved a combination of two fundamental internet technologies, BGP and DNS, both of which are essential in helping computing devices connect to the network. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) helps establish the best way to send data from one device to another until it reaches its final destination. The Domain Name System (DNS) translates human-understandable network names, such as facebook.com, into digital Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are actually used to address and route data on the Internet.

Just before 9 a.m., Cloudflare detected a flurry of unusual updates from Facebook describing changes to how BGP should handle the Facebook portion of the network. Specifically, the updates cut network routes to Facebook’s DNS servers. With these servers offline, typing “facebook.com” in a browser or using the app to try to reach Facebook failed.

In addition to the failure of Facebook services and applications, some of the internal tools would also have been impacted by the breakdown. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a tweet that it sounded like a “snowy day.“

The Facebook outage also appears to have caused a headache for Twitter, with more people going there after finding Facebook down.

“Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter,” Twitter tweeted Monday afternoon. “We are preparing for these times, but today things did not go exactly as planned.”

Sometimes more people are using Twitter than usual. We are preparing for these moments, but today things did not go exactly as planned. Some of you may have had difficulty seeing replies and private messages. This has been corrected. Sorry about that! ??

– Twitter support (@TwitterSupport) October 4, 2021

The outage cost Facebook an estimated $ 60 million in shortfall as of 1:00 p.m./4:00 p.m. ET, according to Fortune and Snopes. Both publications calculated the revenue loss using the roughly $ 29 billion the company reported in its second quarter results. Facebook generates revenue of approximately $ 319.6 million per day, $ 13.3 million per hour, $ 220,000 per minute and $ 3,700 per second. The outlets then used these numbers to calculate the lost revenue based on the length of the outage.

Shares of the social network fell nearly 5% to $ 326.23 per share amid a large sell-off in social media shares. (Twitter and Snap’s shares were both less than more than 5%.)

The fall in Facebook shares weighed on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, which fell to $ 121.6 billion. His net worth is now lower than that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and is the fifth richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.

The outage creates yet another headache for Facebook, which is battling a huge public relations nightmare following allegations by a whistleblower that the social network is aware of the damage caused by the content of its services. The allegations were detailed in a series of articles published by The Wall Street Journal based on research disclosed by the whistleblower which said the company had ignored research into how Instagram can harm teenage girls and that a change algorithm made users angrier.

The whistleblower, a former Facebook product engineer named Frances Haugen, is scheduled to testify before Congress on Tuesday. She detailed some of her allegations in a TV interview on Sunday.

“Facebook, time and time again, has chosen to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” she told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley.

As is often the case with outages, users have flocked to other social networks to complain and also revel in the Facebook outage. Instagram and Facebook quickly became the go-to topic on Twitter in the United States and dominated other places around the world as well. Twitter even got into the joke, with the company’s official account tweeting, “Hello literally everyone“and CEO Jack Dorsey asking”How many? “in response to tweets suggesting the Facebook domain was for sale.

It is not the first time Facebook suffered from a long outage. In 2019, Facebook services suffered from a one day outage that the company blamed on a “server configuration problem”. During previous outages, the social network also cited a DNS problem or one central software problem as causes.,

Read more: The funniest memes and jokes about Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram crash

CNET has contacted Facebook for further comment and we’ll update when we have a response.

CNET’s Carrie Mihalcik contributed to this report.