Facebook services WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger are all down right now. All Facebook apps have been inaccessible for more than three hours, in what is definitely the longest Facebook outage in recent times. The company confirmed this with tweets (since Twitter is the only major social platform working right now) across its various corporate handles, including the Facebook app, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It promised that the app will be back online soon, although as of now, the company has not issued a statement about why this happened. However the consensus opinion now is that this outage is due to a DNS issue, and because it has also affected Facebook’s internal tools, getting a fix is also being affected.
Facebook services appear to have been down from 9pm on Monday, according to reports on outage tracker Down Detector. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger were all persistently unavailable when Gadgets 360 staff tried to access these apps. At this early point, it’s unclear what is causing these issues, but it appears to be a global outage, as reports on Down Detector’s US website are similar. At the time of writing, Facebook’s stock also dipped five percent.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook App (@facebookapp) October 4, 2021
The outage at Facebook has also been an opportunity for competitors, with Signal tweeting that it has seen a huge influx of users, who are not able to send messages using WhatsApp at the moment. It is being speculated that the issue was caused by a DNS problem. As The Verge noted, Dane Knecht, an SVP at Cloudflare, tweeted that Facebook DNS and other services are down.
All Facebook services are unavailable right now.
Facebook has not given any details about the outage at this point, but a Facebook executive did tweet acknowledging the issue, and say that it is looking into the matter. Meanwhile users worldwide are flooding Twitter to make jokes, and even Google seems to want to join the fun.
A word of caution — if you own an Oculus Quest, do not restart your device while Facebook is down, as that could lead to losing access to your games, as researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted.
As mentioned above, this is just the latest in a steady stream of Internet outages. On June 8 a huge chunk of the Internet was inaccessible with popular sites like Reddit, Twitch, and Amazon all affected. a major outage at Amazon impacted users around the world – not just for the Amazon e-commerce platform, but also for a huge number of sites and applications making use of its AWS platform. And in August 2020, there was a huge outage incident involving Google, which also made a huge impact.
