Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp back online after 7-hour outage
Posted October 4, 2021 9:36 am.
Last Updated October 5, 2021 9:18 am.
After a seven-hour outage that felt like a lifetime for some, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services started coming back online around 3:45 p.m. PT Monday.
Facebook, which owns all three platforms, said just after 9 a.m. it was aware some users were having trouble “accessing our apps and products.” By way of an update, they posted on Twitter several hours later to apologize for the disruption, thanking people for bearing with them.
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021
The social media giant said the outage, which lasted the better part of the workday in North America, was caused by “configuration changes.” Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.
Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down.
“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem,” an update from the company Monday reads.
“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it felt like a “snow day.”
But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food.
The Instagram outage likely left scores of small business owners in the lurch, many of whom took to the platform during the COVID-19 pandemic to launch or grow their businesses and depend on it entirely for both sales and customer service.
Disconnected by WhatsApp outage
The WhatsApp disruption meanwhile left millions without a way to contact loved ones, particularly South Asians on the subcontinent and diaspora worldwide, with India being the largest user of the platform.
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company, said it appeared that Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.
Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook’s routing management system could have been to blame.
Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case. If that failed, it could be in for “a world of hurt” — because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centers, he added.
“What it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by Internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,” Bellovin tweeted.
World reacts to platforms going down
Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main Twitter account, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform.
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1445078208190291973
Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “how much?”
how much? https://t.co/fH0zXw7rV9
— jack (@jack) October 4, 2021
Scores of other Twitter users also took to the platform to complain, commiserate or share a laugh while waiting for what many consider to be the entire internet to get back online.
Mark Zuckerberg trying to fix WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram at the same time #WhatsAppDown pic.twitter.com/KlI9vemxf2
— Lummydee (@Lummydee4) October 4, 2021
How long have been WhatsApp Facebook and Instagram down now? pic.twitter.com/3AQ70yNOs9
— Nafisat Abdulazeez (@nohpheesat) October 4, 2021
