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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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Monday October 04 2021, @08:16PM (3 children)
That's half funny, half serious. Among the huge number of users will be a good amount of businesses. That sort which isn't able or willing to set up a full web site, or even too lazy to maintain working e-mail, and bonus points if they substituted mail with WhatsApp. Local building companies, facility services, that stuff. Who rely on FB for order lists.
We've seen (from semiconductors to truck drivers) that the entire industrial sector is so just-in-time that a little bump can cause a massive ripple. Any guess what hit the worldwide supply chains would take if FB/WA go dark for a week?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:10AM (2 children)
Most restaurants don't feel the need to have ephemeral content on their own webpages, so alas that means we're all a slave to Facebook.
So failures like this can be a bit of a bummer. If I've missed a duck breast and parsnip mash with cherry sauce, I'm gonna be pissed off.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @02:15AM (1 child)
> ... parsnip mash ...
I hate parsnips and ignore FB. For some reason I haven't figured out, parsnips taste, to me, like eating dirt. Yuck! Otherwise, I eat all kinds of things, had a great week in Taiwan where they eat all sorts of stuff that we don't usually see in USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:38AM
It's because they do taste like dirt. Some people like dirt.