Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp at least partially reconnected to the global internet late on Monday afternoon, nearly six hours into an outage that paralyzed the social media platform.
Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark at around 5pm Irish time, in what website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure it had ever seen.
Around 9.45pm Irish time, some Facebook users began to regain partial access to the three apps.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it “may take some time to get to 100%.”
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks.
Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Soon after the outage started, Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or say how many users were affected by the outage.
Several Facebook employees who declined to be named said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work.
Facebook, which is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.
A spokeswoman for Facebook Ireland confirmed that the company was experiencing a “technical issue” that has caused its services – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – to go down. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,” she said.
Facebook declined to comment on the cause but the issue is not thought to be related to a hack, and is more likely to be an internal technical fault.
Vodafone internet users were also reporting issues accessing services in Ireland.
According to the operator on Twitter, a “global outage across several media platforms” was impacting the company’s data network performance.
‘Browsing issue’
The operator told users seeking information via Twitter that the company is “currently experiencing a browsing issue due to a suspected [Domain Name System] DNS issue”. According to Vodafone on Twitter, the issue is under investigation.
Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. Facebook controls the relevant settings.
DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies took down multiple websites in July.
Security experts tracking the situation said the outage likely was triggered by a configuration error that left directions to Facebook servers unavailable. That could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites, on the other hand, would require either co-ordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.
Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook tweeted about 30 minutes after the first reports of the outage.
Facebook’s response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said.
Meanwhile, the social-media giant’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for more than 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.
Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.
“If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal,” puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account. – Additional reporting Reuters
