If you, like many others, have been refreshing your Instagram over and over again for the past hour, stop. No, your internet connection is fine. Instead, the fault lies with the platform itself.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp-the three main apps owned by Mark Zuckerberg led Facebook, suffered massive global outage around 9PM IST, where users around the world complained about all of these services not working properly.
The company has acknowledged the issue, and said on 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) October 4, 2021
Downdetector notes widespread outages including Twitter, Google, and Jio. However, Facebook owned apps are the worst hit, and among all the other platforms, seem to be malfunctioning the most.
The cause of the outage has not been made public yet, but it is being assumed that it was a DNS issue (just like it always is), which was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain.
BGP route withdrawals meant that Facebook essentially sent a message to the internet that it was closed, and any traffic that should have gone to its servers went nowhere.
It’s not clear why the BGP routes were withdrawn, but there’s a high chance that this in a update gone terribly wrong.
For the few hours that the platform was done, the Mark Zuckerberg owned organization lost billions of dollars. This coming on the same day as the company’s whistleblower going public is not a good image for the social media giant.
