Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage
Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms suffered a worldwide outage Monday that has extended more than three hours. Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down. Service has not yet been restored.
The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hourslong global disruptions are rare.
“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken contentdelivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.
Facebook’s only public comment so far 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. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels 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.
It also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure. Facebook’s request Monday that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services seemed to ring a bit hollow.
The cause of the outage remains unclear. Madory said it appears 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.
So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as a primary mode of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.
“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said. “They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate.” Tobac said during previous outages, some people have received emails promising to restore their social media account by clicking on a malicious link that can expose their personal data.
“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it. They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate.”
— Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security