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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.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Monday October 04 2021, @09:29PM (2 children)

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 04 2021, @09:29PM (#1184275)
    With the outage running this long, and given how specific to Facebook it is, does their "something is wrong with their DNS" excuse really hold any water?
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @11:00PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @11:00PM (#1184311)

    It says their BGP records are trashed. Depending on their network topology and how badly they trashed it, this could very well be something that needs to be fixed in person one subnet at a time and then a bit of time has to pass before the other peers will pick you up again.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @07:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @07:51AM (#1184384)

      Given how long this took, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have to do exactly that and may have even had to put people on chartered planes to get to some of their network.