Global outage hits Facebook and WhatsApp

INSTAGRAM ALSO OFFLINE AS SERVICE DISRUPTION PERSISTS FOR HOURS

Assistant Online Editor

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms suffered a global outage lasting hours yesterday. Service was not restored at the time of going to press.

The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour.

Thousands of users worldwide started reporting issues with WhatsApp late yesterday. The Down Detector site, which logs outages of platforms worldwide, had around 35,000 reports relating to the outage since 7pm (UAE time). There were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

What caused the outage?

The cause of the outage was unclear. “This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik. He said that 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 (DNS), which translates an address like facebook.com to an IP address. If Facebook’s DNS records disappeared, apps and web addresses would be unable to locate it.

Facebook’s only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing [the] Facebook app” and that it was working on restoring access. Its internal systems used by employees also went down. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day”.

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.