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WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook services were down for the majority of users with several users have resorted to Twitter to report an outage on these platforms. All three services were showing an error that is refreshing. WhatsApp wasn't sending or receiving messages, Instagram showed "couldn't refresh the feed" and the Facebook page took forever to load.
So what happened to Facebook? A Facebook spokesperson gave the statement that, "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."
Marcus Hutchins, a Cybersecurity expert famous on Twitter with the handle MalwareTech, has ruled out global cyber attack possibility. In a tweet, MalwareTech told that, "Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are all down due to a BGP configuration error, which means it's only a matter of time before someone tweets a pew pew map screenshot and claims it's a global cyber attack."
In a similarly worded statement, WhatsApp made use of Twitter to acknowledge the outage, "We're aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We're working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!"
Facebook's Twitter handle tweeted, "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.
Instagram's official communication handle also made similar tweet, "Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we're on it! #instagramdown."
As per Downdetector data, WhatsApp users are reporting issues in the app as well as sending messages. The Downdetector website showed almost 9,000 crash reports for WhatsApp.
Talking about Instagram, Downdetector, the website that tracks services and websites, showed that there are roughly 8,000 users who reported issues. The issue is said to be around server connection. Similarly, the Facebook service outage was reported by approximately 4,000 people on Downdetector and the service claims issue related to the website, app, and server connection.
On Monday, Facebook’s services including WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus VR went down and did not come up till early morning on Tuesday. The outage affected users across the globe, and according to some reports, even impacted Facebook employees as the company’s internal systems were affected, preventing the staff from accessing internal e-mail clients, etc.
In a blog post, Facebook noted its engineering teams found that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s 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,” it said. In a nut shell, Facebook’s machines stopped communicating with each other because of what is called a DNS (domain name system) error.
Explaining a DNS error, Lotem Finkelstenn, Head of Threat Intelligence at Check Point Software Technologies explained: “Simply, it is the internet protocol to convert the words we use like Facebook.com to language computers know — numbers, or internet address. They do the conversion and route us to the services and applications we asked to use. When this service falls, the services look like they are down, but actually just not accessible.”
Facebook explained in its blog: “We want to make clear at this time 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”. As per the New York Times, which cited two anonymous Facebook security team members, the outage was not likely a result of a cyberattack because the technology behind the apps was still different enough that one hack was not likely to affect all of them at once, it explained.
The Facebook family of apps suffered a major outage earlier this year in March as well when the services were down for almost 45 minutes. Even prior to this, in 2020 alone, four major WhatsApp outages had occurred, of which the most major one was in January, which had lasted for around three hours. After this, there was one in April, followed by a two-hour outage in July and a brief one in August. In 2019, Facebook suffered its longest outage ever when the social media service was down for nearly about 24 hours.
There has been a increase in internet outages in recent years. As per data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc, there were 367 global internet outages in the week ending September 26, making it the third consecutive week of increasing outages. Even as the internet was originally conceptualised as a decentralised network, experts believe that a handful of infrastructure companies like Akamai, Fastly, Amazon Web Services have become concentrated centres providing their services to major internet platforms. This, especially after thousands of enterprises be it small or large are increasing their digitisation efforts after the pandemic.
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