All of the major Facebook-owned social media networks and apps including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook itself were reported down in locations across the world on Monday evening.
Attempts to visit Facebook’s website were met with the error: “This site can’t be reached www.facebook.com’s server IP address could not be found.”
Facebook’s own website to check the site’s status, status.fb.com, was also down as of publishing.
Facebook tweeted acknowledging the outage.
"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."
The Instagram communications handle also tweeted, "Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown"
The outage comes as a whistleblower is set to deliver testimony to Congress about the company’s allegedly harmful policies. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, said Facebook had shown “over and over again” that it chooses “profit over safety”.
Her efforts including giving documents to the Wall Street Journal showing how Facebook was aware that Instagram worsened body image issues among teenagers, and how it treated users and acted on user complaints differently based on their relative importance.
Stocks of both Facebook and Twitter plunged on Monday. While Facebook's stock dipped by over five per cent (a fall driven both by the outage and the prospect of fallout from the whistleblower's testimony), Twitter's stock freefall by over six per cent came even as Facebook users flocked to its platform.
According to website DownDetector, Twitter users have also been reporting problems accessing the site.
Users have been speculating as to what caused the outage of such scale. Many observed that the whois records for facebook.com appear to show the domain being up for sale.
Independent journalist Brian Krebs said Facebook's DNS records were withdrawn in the morning.
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) October 4, 2021
Others have pointed out that all of Facebook's DNS servers have not been responding.
So, @facebook's DNS is broken this morning...
— Jim Salter (@jrssnet) October 4, 2021
TL;DR: Google anycast DNS returns SERVFAIL for Facebook queries; querying https://t.co/0BDgaIHmlr directly times out. pic.twitter.com/3GHJ3mW0P0
(This remains a developing story.)
