Internet4.10.2021

WhatsApp and Facebook hit by global outage

A major global outage hit WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram on Monday evening.

The desktop sites and mobile apps of all three Facebook-owned platforms were offline from around 17:30.

Downdetector showed a sharp increase in reports of issues from that time.

Users recorded more than 33,000 reports at one stage for just WhatsApp.

Numerous users flocked to Twitter to complain about the outage, with WhatsApp trending at #1 in South Africa with 768,000 tweets half an hour later.

Texts, voice, and video calls on WhatsApp were not working, while Facebook and Instagram feeds would not refresh or load uncached content.

The desktop sites were also completely inaccessible.

The image below shows the message users were presented with when attempting to access the Facebook and WhatsApp websites.

Based on reports from international sites, the issues appeared to be global.

Twitter user Benjamin Petzuch posted a screenshot showing that accessing Facebook.com from numerous countries would present an “Unknown host” error.

In an update on Twitter, Facebook said it was aware that some people were having trouble accessing its apps and products.

“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” the company said.

Facebook did not say what was behind the outage or how long it would continue.

Cloudflare senior vice president Dane Knecht tweeted that Facebook’s DNS and other services were down.

“It appears their BGP routes have been withdrawn from the internet. Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 started seeing high failure in the last 20 minutes,” Knecht stated.

Tech blogger Jane Manchun Wong claimed Facebook’s Workplace and internal sites were also having issues.

The charts below show the increase in reports about each service on Downdetector and a closer look at the reports on WhatsApp in particular.

Update: Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer confirmed that Facebook is experiencing networking issues. He did not provide details as to the nature or cause of the problems.

“Teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore,” Schroepfer stated.

Schroepfer announced in September that he was stepping down as Facebook’s CTO and would be replaced by Andrew Bosworth in 2022. Bosworth currently helms Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality efforts.


Now read: New WhatsApp voice note feature

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