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What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?

posted by martyb on Monday October 04 2021, @07:47PM   
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.

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Original Submission

• What happen to sites that embed facebook tools? What happen to sites that embed facebook tools? (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @08:22PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @08:22PM (#1184249)

  Personally I hope they are gone too

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• Re:What happen to sites that embed facebook tools? (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday October 04 2021, @08:27PM

  by Thexalon (636) on Monday October 04 2021, @08:27PM (#1184253)

  One of my clients insists on having FB pixels about, and those did in fact cause problems for his pages when they couldn't load. Apparently, FB's pixel code they recommend you paste in to handle them can't consider the possibility that FB is completely non-functional and stalls trying to do the DNS lookup.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

  Parent

• Re:What happen to sites that embed facebook tools? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @09:30PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @09:30PM (#1184276)

  lol, yes please hope they all fail also.

  This is a fantastic time to be alive.
  World rids itself of largest virus to enslave human kind.
  Priceless.

  Parent