UPDATED 16:41 EDT / OCTOBER 04 2021

APPS

Hours-long outage renders Facebook’s platforms inaccessible for users

Updated:

All of Facebook Inc.’s social media platforms became inaccessible for users starting about 11:45 a.m. EDT today as a result of a yet-unexplained outage.

The hours-long outage affected Facebook’s namesake social network, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Users have reportedly encountered multiple types of error messages across the services, including “Sorry, something went wrong” and “5xx Server Error,” among others. Facebook’s Oculus Quest virtual reality headsets are affected as well.

Update: As of about 6:15 p.m. EDT, the site was back up, but the web infrastructure and security firm CloudFlare said some services will take longer to be restored.

Even the company’s Workplace team collaboration platform is said to be experiencing issues. As a result, employees of the social network reportedly have limited access to some work-related tools. The outage is also affecting a number of third-party applications that integrate with Facebook’s login system.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook said in a statement. The company has not yet shared any technical details on the outage. 

According to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, Facebook’s Domain Name System infrastructure encountered a malfunction this morning. The Domain Name System, or DNS, helps establish connections between users’ browsers and websites. When a user enters a URL into a browser, the backend DNS infrastructure finds the servers that host the corresponding website.

It’s unclear whether the issue with Facebook’s DNS infrastructure is what led to today’s outage, or if the root cause is another system. 

Separately, Cloudflare Inc. Senior Vice President Dane Knecht noted that Facebook’s Border Gateway Protocol or BGP routers are experiencing issues as well. BGP, like DNS, is a foundational component of the internet, though it has a different function. The technology is responsible for finding the fastest network path through which data can travel between a user’s browser and a website.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger previously experienced a brief outage in April. The social network attributed the incident to a configuration change but didn’t share more detailed technical information. 

Photo: Eston Bond/Flickr

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU