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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hit by outage
Users in UK, US and other countries find services inaccessible as company apologises
Dan Milmo Global technology editor
Mon 4 Oct 2021 18.46 BST

Facebook’s network of services including Instagram and WhatsApp has been hit by an outage in several countries including the UK and the US, affecting millions of people as the company said users were having “trouble accessing our apps”.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for large numbers of people at about 5pm UK time and were still down at 6.30pm, with the downdetector.com site reporting more than 120,000 outages for Facebook users in the US and nearly 60,000 in the UK. A map on the site showed reports of outages from cities across the US and UK.

In a blogpost downdetector said the outage was global. “Facebook is currently experiencing a rarely seen global outage that is taking out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. No word yet from Facebook on what caused the outage, but as of 9:30am PDT [5.30pm BST], we’ve seen over 5.6 million reports about issues with the company’s services from around the world.”

On Twitter, the Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said: “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 apologise for any inconvenience.”

The Instagram site was displaying a 5xx server error message, while the Facebook site was telling users: “Sorry, something went wrong.”

WhatsApp said on Twitter: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.”

Facebook is weathering a major PR crisis after a whistleblower, who supplied the Wall Street Journal with a series of stories exposing the company’s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions, went public on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

Monday’s outage is the first serious incident for Facebook since 2019 when it suffered a series of failures, including on 13 March, when some users around the world could not access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than 24 hours.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -by-outage

Facebook, Instagram, WatsApp, and Messenger are all down for the last 7 hours. It is 5 am and soon half of the population of Cambodia will have nothing to do when they wake up.

cambo swa wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:13 am Facebook, Instagram, WatsApp, and Messenger are all down for the last 7 hours. It is 5 am and soon half of the population of Cambodia will have nothing to do when they wake up.

Came back just in time then.

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:21 am
Facebook is weathering a major PR crisis after a whistleblower, who supplied the Wall Street Journal with a series of stories exposing the company’s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions, went public on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

I once worked for a company in an industry that pushes heavily to maintain self-regulation. They had a Social Responsibility officer who attended all meetings, ostensibly to hold management to account. In practice her job was to help management find ways to weasel their way into giving the appearance of responsibility without having to do anything that could affect their bottom line.

Self-regulation doesn’t work.

Facebook blamed a "faulty configuration change" for a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
Facebook outage is dry run for worse web crashes

NEW YORK, Oct 4 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Mark Zuckerberg can’t catch a break lately. The Facebook (FB.O) boss wants to turn the two-dimensional internet into a metaverse where “instead of just viewing content, you are in it,” according to an interview with the Verge. But hot on the heels of an exposé of some uncomfortable internal documents provided by a whistleblower who is about to appear before the U.S. Congress, his entire company went dark on two-dimensional screens.

The Facebook and Instagram social networks, plus messaging service WhatsApp, were kaput for hours on Monday. It’s easy to dismiss the $920 billion company’s advertising-funded outlets as vehicles for cat pictures and selfies. But plenty of folks, including government officials, rely on WhatsApp as a primary means of communication. And Facebook is the main way some businesses reach customers. So the outage matters.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/f ... 021-10-05/

slept thru the whole thing LOL

Yes, I too missed that one, but what does the future hold for the worlds leading communication sites. At least we still had CEO running online.

I heard the Khmer elites were all boarding private helicopters and heading towards iron grandpa's bunker within the first hour of the outage

It’s a more insidious attack. The attackers wiped the pointer address to Facebook and other related accounts from the address manager on their servers.

Basically, when one types in an address, say ‘Facebook’, the request goes to a DNS name server. The server actually translates the name into the general IP number for the website. The website then takes the request and then checks the account and delivers the correct home page to correct user.

This attack blanked out Facebook servers pointing to the correct pages.

At least this my understanding from the news reports coming in.

newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 8:37 pm It’s a more insidious attack. The attackers wiped the pointer address to Facebook and other related accounts from the address manager on their servers.

Basically, when one types in an address, say ‘Facebook’, the request goes to a DNS name server. The server actually translates the name into the general IP number for the website. The website then takes the request and then checks the account and delivers the correct home page to correct user.

This attack blanked out Facebook servers pointing to the correct pages.

At least this my understanding from the news reports coming in.

No, no. It was self-inflicted. A configuration error done by Facebook. Never one mention of an "attack".