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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: -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.