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

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday October 04 2021, @08:11PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 04 2021, @08:11PM (#1184238) Journal

    The oil spill is now old news. The major story which affects all humanity is that Facebook is Down!

    But not only Facebook, other applications that are critical to the survival of the human race such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday October 04 2021, @08:18PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Monday October 04 2021, @08:18PM (#1184246) Journal

    With Facebook down, how will people release all that pent up hate and anger? Is somebody making popcorn? Or is that just the sound of heads exploding?

    Best hack ever... The story of who took Facebook down will forever be as mysterious as the Kennedy killings

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 04 2021, @08:31PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 04 2021, @08:31PM (#1184255) Journal

      It had to be the Deep State. In order to censor conservative messages. And to prevent the next generation of capitol rioters and domestic terrorists from organizing or posting their trophy pictures after they break in.

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