Update: towards midnight in Spain, Facebook and Instagram showed signs of reviving, with some intermittence in the service, and a few minutes later all services including Whatsapp were restored, as Facebook announced on Twitter: “To the great community of people and companies around the world who depend on us: we are sorry. We have been working to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report that they are now back online. Thanks for sticking with us.”
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
– Facebook Facebook)
The great blackout of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, chronicle of the biggest drop in its history… until now
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram fell in Spain… and all over the world. Since approximately 5:30 p.m. on Monday, multiple users reported problems connecting to any of the empire’s. Finally for hours no user was able to access any of the Facebook services.
As on other occasionsthe blackout of the three most used social networks in the world came suddenly, almost simultaneously causing the inability to access Facebook and Instagram, or send/receive messages from Whatsapp, and while these types of outages have not been uncommon over the years, the fact that so many apps from the largest social media company of the world to fall at the same time and for so long it has been highly unusual.
And even though several hours have passed since the fall, the company gave more explanation about what was happening: «YesWe are aware that some people have problems accessing our applications and products. We are working to get everything back to normal as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”explained the company through 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)
Three hours later Mike Schroepfer, Facebook CTO offered his “Sincere apologies to everyone affected by the interruptions of Facebook services at this time. We are experiencing network issues and the teams are working as fast as they can to debug and restore as quickly as possible.”
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep)
What happened to Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp? latest reports
More than four hours after the catastrophe began on Facebook, there was still no sign or probable restoration of services or estimate of the time that remained to solve it, and it was almost eight hours that were required to get it up and running, but what was what caused this big glitch?
Although there is no official statement yet, it is known that , the outage disabled almost all internal communication systems and employees had to resort to their Outlook email accounts, although they could not receive emails from external addresses. At the same time, Facebook’s internal communications platform, Workplace was also down, leaving many unable to do their jobs and in the meantime they had to turn to other platforms like LinkedIn, Zoom, and Discord chat rooms to communicate.
In addition, it was reported that Facebook employees who had returned to work in the offices were also unable to enter the buildings and conference rooms due to your digital credentials stopped working. Security engineers said they couldn’t assess the outage because they can’t reach server areas.
A reveals that, in addition to the problem being widespread, your DNS records were showing an outage. A theory reaffirmed by the senior vice president of Cloudflare, who pointed out that the routes of the gateway protocol, key to the proper functioning of any communications network, they had been “internet withdrawals”.
Namely, the user devices did not find the routes by which they can reach the IP addresses of the servers where they are stored due to a protocol configuration problem inside the company, something confirmed by Benjamin Enfield, CEO at The Academy Music on his Twitter account.
So, someone deleted large sections of the routing….that doesn’t mean Facebook is just down, from the looks of it….that means Facebook is GONE.
— The Academy (@BenjaminEnfield)
Computers and devices convert websites like Facebook into numerical internet protocol (IP) addresses, through a system that we can resemble a phone book. Facebook’s problem was the equivalent of removing people’s phone numbers after their names in your address book.making it impossible to call them, said Cloudflare as an example to understand a little more the problem after the fall.
It seems that the root of Facebook’s problem is that someone from FB has deleted their BGP tables from the Internet.
And they can’t access to reconfigure their BGP because FB hosts its own DNS servers.
Translation: They have erased themselves from the Internet 🤦♀️
– Rafa Merino (@rafamerino)
After finding the bug, the company sent a team of employees to Facebook’s data center in Santa Clara, California, in order to attempt a “manual reset” of the company’s servers, which finally seems to have solved this problem.
Facebook has sent a team to one of its California data centers to try to manually reset its servers – NYT
— BNO News (@BNONews)
For practical purposes for hours Facebook disappeared from the internetas the paths to their apps disappeared, leading some people to put the Facebook.com domain up for auction.
Seeing that, too. WTH?
— briankrebs (@briankrebs)
Of course this was caused by DNS problems, however Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter joined the joke by asking: “How much?”.
how much?
—jack⚡️ (@jack)
Finally, Facebook in which he explained the following:
“To all the people and companies around the world who depend on us, Sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage on our platforms. We have worked as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now up and running again. The underlying cause of this outage also affected many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, which complicated our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Our engineering teams have found that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused problems that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a standstill.
Our services are now back online and we are actively working to fully return them to normal operations. We want to make it clear at this point that we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
And of course, after such a fall in Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg’s shares have had a very bad start to the week by presenting a crash: Facebook Inc. shares fell 4.89%%, trading at 326.23 Dollars. This strong downward trend also as Apple (-2.5%), Microsoft (-2.1%), Twitter (-5.8%) and (-2%).
Thus, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has been reduced by almost $7 billion in the last few hoursremaining, for now, below Bill Gates, the fifth place in the index, but of course, it is expected that during the next few hours it will rise by having put its services online again.
And of course, in the absence of the main social networks, users emigrated at least temporarily to other social networks, mainly Twitter and Telegram that serve as a substitute for WhatsApp but that also presented problems in some countries according to Downdetector records. Although there is no official information about it either, the main probable cause is that there was a greater number of people who used the application, which caused a saturation of the service.
User reports indicate Telegram is having problems since 1:49 PM EDT. RT if you’re also having problems
— Downdetector (@downdetector)
precedents
As you can imagine, this is not the first time that a massive drop has occurred. One of the last big Facebook blackouts happened in July 2020. Unlike other crashes of these social networks, on that occasion the problem seemed to be concentrated in Spanish territory, although there were also English users who reported problems accessing their accounts as you can see on this map of .
11/28/2019 Facebook wanted to leave Black Friday… ahead of time
On this occasion, the problem was solved in the early hours of November 28 to 29 in Spain without further explanation from the company.
Once again, just before the , and as it happened in 2018, Facebook and Instagram experienced failures all over the planet, with a special focus on the American continent, as you can see in this Down Detector image:
Facebook did not explain what was happeningalthough the experts we consulted told us that these types of problems usually occur on the eve of major changes in Mark Zuckerberg’s social network or, as in the case of Black Friday, when periods of heavy advertising load accumulate.
Has it fallen and? ?
— Ron Martz™ (@ron_220588)
The precedent of 2018
As we told you, it was not the first time that Facebook fell just before Black Friday. In that case, the blackout was also global, with problems that also included Messenger throughout Western Europe, as you can see in this image of . Users from the United States and various Latin American countries they had the same problems. In the month of September 2018, Messenger already experienced problems, which were related to the update that would allow the function that allows deleting messages already sent to be launched.
But also, the other great social network of the group, Instagram also experienced problems around the world, both publishing and uploading new content,…
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