In what is being called the worst outage for Facebook since 2019, on 4 October, when Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC, its entire network of services went offline. Davis was defending the giant over a whistleblower’s accusations and the company’s handling, or lack thereof, of internal research data, which suggests Instagram to be harmful for teenagers.
The outage, which took down Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and OculusVR worldwide, began just before noon ET. It took about six hours to finally restore the services. The last big outage for Facebook had taken its site off the web for more than 24 hours—the downtime affected small businesses and creators who rely on these applications for their income.
For yesterday’s outage, Facebook said that the cause was a configuration change to its routers, not, as was being speculated, a hack or an attempt to steal user data. According to the blog post explaining what had happened, Facebook said, “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
After running tests for most of the day unsuccessfully, a test of ISP DNS servers via DNSchecker.org showed that most of them could find a route to Facebook.com at 5:30PM ET. And a few minutes later, users could use Facebook and Instagram normally.
According to The Verge, several Facebook employees told them that the outage ended up breaking all systems of communication used internally among teams, making them switch over to Outlook to talk to each other. Those who were already logged into Google Docs and Zoom could continue working on them, but anyone else who needed to log in with their work ID was unable to do so.
