Facebook is down, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus VR

Just like Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC Defending the company against a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, the company’s entire service network suddenly went offline. The outage began just before noon ET, and almost four hours later, there is no sign or restoration, and no one from the company has provided an explanation of the issues or an estimate of when they will. will be resolved.

On Twitter, Facebook communications manager Andy Stone said, “We are aware that some people have difficulty accessing our applications and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience. “

A glance at Down Detector (or your Twitter feed) reveals that the problems are widespread. While it’s not clear exactly why the platforms are inaccessible to so many people, their DNS records show that, like last week’s Slack outage, the problem is apparently DNS (it’s still DNS).

Dane Knecht, Senior Vice President of Cloudflare Remarks that Facebook’s border gateway protocol routes – BGP helps networks choose the best path to carry Internet traffic – have been “taken off the Internet.” While some have speculated on hackers or an internal protest against last night’s whistleblower report, there is still no information to suggest anything malicious is to blame.

Instagram.com displays an error message from the 5xx server, while the Facebook site is simply telling us that something has gone wrong. The problem also appears to affect its virtual reality arm, Oculus. Users can load games that they have already installed and the browser will work, but not social features or installing new games. The outage is significant enough to affect Workplace of Facebook customers and, according to Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook’s internal sites.

Update October 4 at 3:37 p.m. ET: Added additional information on the current failure.