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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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:10AM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:10AM (#1184327) Homepage
    A lot of the nearby restaurants use facebook to announce their daily special lunch offers on facebook. A couple of people have created portals/scrapers that merge all that information into a couple of huge lists. This is almost invaluable to me - if you can cream the best off the top, lunch is the best meal of the day almost every day.

    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.
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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @02:15AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @02:15AM (#1184348)

    > ... 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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:38AM (#1184614)

      It's because they do taste like dirt. Some people like dirt.