Facebook suffered a major outage today that affected multiple other platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. The outage lasted more than six hours and led to users all around the world having trouble accessing these services. This included internal services that Facebook employees didn’t have access to either until things came back online.
So if you found yourself kicked out of Facebook Messenger and unable to message any of your besties, you can rest calmly knowing that you weren’t alone.
The outage began around 9AM PT (12PM ET) and seemed to be caused by DNS troubles. It took time for the fix to propagate across the net to different users, leading to some busy traffic on other platforms like Twitter as users talk about what was happening (some users clearly going through sudden FB withdrawal).
Facebook was quick to keep everyone updated through the same alternative networks, so that speculation wouldn’t run rampant.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” — Facebook said via Twitter.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Eventually, Facebook was able to confirm that all services were back online and successfully running. There doesn’t seem to be any signs of foul play, so it is likely just a mistake made somewhere either by a human or service.
