Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp return after outage — as it happened

Website monitoring group Downdetector said Monday’s outage was the largest such failure it had ever seen. The outage also comes as Facebook contends with damaging revelations from an ex-employee.

• Facebook and its apps have returned to normal
• The outage struck at around 1545 GMT
• Facebook has also been hit by a whistleblower’s damning revelations
• The New York Times reported the social media giant tried a manual reset
• Similar outage affected Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram in 2019, but this one lasted much longer

  Now that all of Facebook’s platforms appear to be up and running, at least for now, the live updates on a dramatic day for the social media giant are at an end.

  Zuckerberg apologizes

  Mark Zuckerberg commented on his company’s global outage, in a Facebook post on his restored site.

  Zuckerberg offered no explanation for what had happened, merely saying: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he posted.

  Facebook: User data not compromised

  Facebook Inc said there was no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of the outage.

  While investigations are ongoing, Facebook said it “believes the root cause of the outage was a faulty configuration change.”

  Full service resumed on WhatsApp

  WhatsApp’s head of operations, Will Cathcart, promised the firm would “learn and grow” from Monday’s disruptions.

  “We’re entirely back up and running now. We know that people were unable to use WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family, businesses, community groups, and more today — a humbling reminder of how much people and organizations rely on our app every day.”

  3.5 billion users affected

  Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp fired up once again after roughly six hours of not functioning which prevented Facebook’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging
  services.

  Facebook apologized but did not immediately explain what caused the outage, the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.

  Facebook stocks tumble following damning revelations

  Stocks in Facebook plummeted almost 5% following Monday’s outage aligned with an expose into the social media giant’s operations.

  Former employee Frances Haugen appeared on Sunday night television show “60 minutes” and revealed that she had been the source of internal documents and research showing the company knew of the harmful effects caused by its platforms.

  The data scientist said the company in its present form fuels hate, unrest and misinformation, and said that the organization knew about these issues, but did not act on them.

  WhatsApp back online

  Shortly after the partial return of Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp also appeared to be back in service. The platform apologized to users and said: “We’re slowly and carefully getting WhatsApp working again.”

  Partial services restored to some apps

  Social media apps Facebook and Instagram appear to have been partially reconnected after major disruptions to the popular online platforms were reported in a global outage on Monday.

  Facebook Engineering tweeted that its apps and services were coming back online and took the opportunity to apologize to users.

  WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have also been impacted and still appear to be out of service.

  The outage tracking site, Downdetector said it had received almost 14 million reported disruptions in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, India and several other countries.

  Earlier the New York Times reported that Facebook had deployed a team  — at its data center in California — to carry out a “manual reset” of the servers.

  Flurry of error reports

  The platforms appeared to go down around 1545 GMT, prompting a flurry of error reports.

  In a message on Twitter, Facebook acknowledged the outage, saying “we’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

  WhatsApp and Instagram issued similar messages on Twitter, with the latter writing that the service is “having a little bit of a hard time right now” and asking for patience.

  Users also flagged disruptions with providers Vodafone, T-Mobile and Verizon in the UK, Italy, the US, Germany and other countries, according to Downdetector.

  The issues appear to primarily impact internet use on cell phones or in gaming apps and other sites where Facebook is used to log-in. The ability to make phone calls or send text messages was not impacted.

  Reactions

  Many social media users — and companies — turned to Twitter for information and to log issues, which the social media site taking it in stride by writing the message: “hello literally everyone.”

  WhatsApp responded with a “hello” of its own, prompting Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to also jump in on the exchange.

  “Thought this was supposed to be encrypted…” he wrote,  poking fun at the Facebook-owned app’s encrypted messaging service.

  What caused the disruption?

  An official reason for the disruption has not yet been given — nor an idea about when the platforms would be up and running again.

  Several tech experts, however, believe a DNS (domain name system) issue could be behind the crash, reported news agency DPA. The system converts website names typed out with letters into IP addresses that computers can process.

  John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer of the cloud service Cloudflare, said that continued attempts by users to access the site have also led to overloading on DNS services.

  Has this happened before?

  A similar major outage hit Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram in April 2019 — but the platforms only stayed down for a few hours.

  In July this year, issues at the internet network company Akamai also caused several major websites to briefly go down. At the time, the firm said the issue was due to a DNS issue that directs browsers to websites.

  In another head-scratching outage in June, issues with the cloud service Fastly briefly took out the websites of the British government, The Guardian, The New York Times, Reddit and others.

  Source: dw.com