Facebook Down for Hours for Many Users Around the Nation, Possibly the World

Update: Facebook appears to be back online as of 6:55 ET.

Well, Facebook is about as useless as Joe Biden today. At least that’s in our view. But it’s definitely useless to us and many others. It’s reported that WhatsApp and Instagram are down too. Andy Stone appeared to downplay it:

“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.”

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.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021

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

Jack Dorsey even took to Twitter to mock and troll Facebook as well as the official Twitter account of Twitter. We can’t confirm the tweet that Jack Dorsey quote tweeted for sure though.

how much? https://t.co/fH0zXw7rV9

— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 4, 2021

McDonald’s also responded to Twitter with “hi what can i get u”

hi what can i get u

— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) October 4, 2021

Instagram mocked itself:

Hi and happy Monday 😵‍💫

— Instagram (@instagram) October 4, 2021

From the NYT:

Facebook and some of its apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, appeared to go down at the same time on Monday for many users, who turned to Twitter and other social media platforms to lament the outage.

The social network and its apps began displaying error messages before noon Eastern time, users reported. All of the company’s family of apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — showed outage reports, according to the site downdetector.com, which monitors web traffic and site activity.

Outages are not uncommon for apps, but to have so many interconnected apps at the world’s largest social media company go down at the same time is rare. The company has been trying to integrate the underlying technical infrastructure of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram for several years.

All this comes as a whistleblower says Facebook puts profits over people. Some speculated as to whether or not it’s a coincidence. Facebook stock dropped almost 6% today.

Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers QT’ed us:

Down https://t.co/5wFbNpaFd7

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) October 4, 2021

We will update this story as we can.

From Reuters:

Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. Facebook itself controls the relevant settings.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc (AKAM.O) took down multiple websites in July. 

Security experts tracking the situation said the outage likely was triggered by a configuration error that left directions to Facebook servers unavailable. That could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.