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You are here: Home / dns / Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp Suffer Outage

Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp Suffer Outage

October 4, 2021 by Michele Neylon

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have all suffered an outage this afternoon.

Facebook owns all three platforms, so it looks like there’s an issue on Facebook’s side.

It’s unclear at this juncture what is causing the outage, though previous outages impacting big platforms have usually been due to software updates gone wrong.

However it is clear that it’s impacting reachability of the Facebook servers including DNS. So, as ever, the issue is DNS related (sort of!)

DNS for facebook.com is not working in most parts of the world. Image via DNSChecker.org

Several online services are reporting that before the outage started the Facebook network started vanishing from the BGP routing tables.

Cloudflare’s CTO, for example, noted:

About five minutes before Facebook's DNS stopped working we saw a large number of BGP changes (mostly route withdrawals) for Facebook's ASN. pic.twitter.com/dMTevg6hqj

— John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) October 4, 2021

In simpler terms, the internet’s global address books don’t know how to reach Facebook’s data centres, as the IP addresses and a way to get to them is not as accessible at it should be.

Twitter and other platforms are not impacted, a fact that somebody chez Twitter has decided to exploit 🙂

hello literally everyone

— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021

Of course an outage like this comes at a cost. How much? While that’s probably impossible to calculate accurately Netblocks calculator puts it at around $161 million per hour:

How long will the outage last? Nobody knows, but at time of writing it had been down for nearly two hours

Filed Under: dns Tagged With: dns, facebook, instagram

About Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and managing director of Irish domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. Michele has been deeply involved in domain and internet policy discussions for more than a decade.
He also co-hosts the Technology.ie podcast.

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