Why did Facebook go down?

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus all went down on October 5th, 2021 around 12:40 PM CST. We started noticing error codes displaying across all platforms, including Facebook Messenger (a separate app). With over 3.5 billion users around the world, it was certainly a bit of a shock for those that use these social media sites to manage their family photos, talk to relatives, and advertise. Another side effect of these tools going down, users could no longer use their Facebook to login into various other apps like their smart TVs, online shopping, thermostats, and other internet-connected devices. 

What brought down Facebook?

According the Facebook’s press release, they experienced “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues 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 halt.” They also mentioned that they have no reason to believe that any user data was compromised. 

So, the root cause was essentially “technical difficulties”.

‘Networking issues’ took the sites down just before noon ET

Here are some links to recent posts and the Facebook Twitter account.

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) October 4, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22708989/instagram-facebook-outage-messenger-whatsapp-error

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-back-online.html 

Outages Across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus

If you’re having trouble logging in to Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even Oculus, you’re not alone. Down Detector showed the problem began this morning shortly after 8 am and is widespread.

Facebook communications exec Andy Stone took to Twitter to explain, “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.”

It’s unclear what the issue is and when everything will be back online, but DNS records show it’s a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS).

Right now, you’ll see Facebook’s “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” and Instagram’s “5xx Server Error.”

With the virtual reality system, Oculus, users seem to be able to load games already installed, but new games cannot be downloaded and none of the social features work.

We’ll keep you updated as we have more information.