Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 13 submissions in the queue.
Breaking News

What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?

posted by martyb on Monday October 04 2021, @07:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the What's-up?-Not-WhatsApp dept.

upstart writes:

What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?:

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don't yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That's because Facebook's email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

[...] This is a developing story and will likely be updated throughout the day.

Also at: C|Net and Ars Technica.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 81 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday October 04 2021, @07:59PM (2 children)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Monday October 04 2021, @07:59PM (#1184227)

    saw themselves as they really are and decided to commit seppuku out of shame?

    If only...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=3, Interesting=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   5  

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 04 2021, @08:01PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 04 2021, @08:01PM (#1184230) Journal

    We can only wish.

    I'm sure they look in the mirror and see themselves as angels of light. Helping the human race.

    --
    There are three difficult things in software. Naming things, and off by one errors.