On Oct 4, 2021, Monday social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for 6+ hours. The reason is a major DNS problem.
Starting at about 11:44 AM EDT, social media messaging platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus services were globally down.
Even, the browsers were showing DNS errors while trying to access those websites.
The reason for the global outage is stated to be an issue in the BGP routing.
For folks who don’t know what BGP routing is, the BGP routing is the standardized exterior gateway protocol that is used to exchange the routing and ensures network reachability information among the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS).
As per the report from Cloudflare, the Facebook services came back at 5.28 PM EDT.
Jane Manchun Wong tweeted that Facebook’s internal Workplace site and the linked services are also not working. The company even distributed memos explaining the issues.
The New York Times report said that virtually everything inside Facebook was broken. This included the capability to use keycards for accessing the buildings, security systems, an internal calendar and scheduling tools, and many more. The Verge reported that Facebook employees temporarily switched to platforms like Discord and FaceTime to communicate with each other.
Fun Fact: Popular website Is It Down Right Now website also went down as people were accidentally flooding requests to check whether Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp aren’t working just for them.
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