Facebook and its family of apps are DOWN

Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went down world wide on Monday, taking out a vital communications platform (vital is in the eyes of the beholder) used by more than three billion people around the world and adding heat to a company already under intense scrutiny.

Just as Facebook representatives were live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, its entire network of services suddenly went offline. The outage started just before noon ET yesterday (Monday, October 4^th), and nearly 6 hours later as I put this article up for discussion, there’s no sign of restoration, and no one from the company has offered an explanation of the issues or estimates for when the problem will be fixed.

When I attempt to log in to FB, all I get is a spinning Facebook logo. I’m picturing millions of people melting down as their preferred method of communication is just not available.

On Twitter, Facebook communications exec Andy Stone says, “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.” “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

Inside Facebook, the outage has broken nearly all of the internal systems employees use to communicate and work. Several employees told The Verge they’ve resorted to talking through their work-provided Outlook email accounts, though employees can’t receive emails from external addresses. Employees who were logged into work tools such as Google Docs and Zoom before the outage can still use those, but any employee who needs to login with their work email is blocked.

Facebook engineers have been sent to the company’s U.S. data centers to try and fix the problem, according to people familiar with the situation. That means the outage, already Facebook’s most severe in years, could be further prolonged.

A peek at www.DownDetector.com reveals the problems are widespread. While it’s unclear exactly why the platforms are unreachable for so many people, their DNS records show that the problem is apparently DNS (In the IT world, it’s ALWAYS DNS that causes these problems).

Cloudflare senior vice president Dane Knecht notes that Facebook’s border gateway protocol routes (BGP helps networks pick the best path to deliver internet traffic) have been “withdrawn from the internet.” While some have speculated about hackers, or an internal protest over last night’s whistleblower report on 60 Minutes, there isn’t any information yet to suggest anything malicious.

Instagram.com is flashing a 5xx Server Error message, while the Facebook site merely tells us that something went wrong. The problem also appears to be affecting its virtual reality app, Oculus. Users can load games they already have installed, and the browser works, but social features or installing new games does not. The outage is thorough enough that it’s affecting Workplace from Facebook customers and, Facebook’s internal sites.

What will Billions of Facebook users do now?????

Thanks again to The Verge