During October 4th, many of Facebooks products, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and the Facebook website and app itself became unavailable to a large number of users.
The outage has affected both websites and mobile apps belonging to Facebook.
The incident has been met by a surge of users flooding to alternative social media, most notably Twitter, where the terms Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Zuckerberg were trending within minutes.
Even the website IsItDownRightNow.com – a site that will tell you if a website is down across most of the Internet or just for a specific user – itself went down, most likely due to the influx of users suddenly checking the website.
The cause of the downtime is currently unknown, but error messages displayed when trying to access Facebook suggest the issue is related to a DNS error (as is often the case with large scale outages.)
The Facebook domain also does not respond to a Ping request (where a user can send and receive a simple signal back from a web server.)
Many online have speculated it is a configuration error on the part of Facebook, possibly related to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which is a set of standardized rules that routes traffic through the complex jungle we call “the Internet”. Configuration errors regarding BGP would mean Internet traffic (i.e. a user trying to bring up a specific website) would get lost since there would be no instructions (i.e. a map) on how to reach Facebook’s own servers that store their website/app. Consequently users would experience an error.
Andy Stone from Facebook’s Communications department tweeted at the start of the outage that Facebook is trying to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
The outage comes amid Facebook being in the news after a Facebook whistleblower – subsequently identified as former product manager Frances Haugen – leaked thousands of pages of documents revealed that the social media Goliath would regularly prioritise growth over the safety of their own users.
However there is nothing to suggest that the outage is related to these headlines.
This article will be updated to reflect the latest updates regarding this emerging story.
UPDATE: What happened – see here.