Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon Web Services are all down along with internet services on phones supported by Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T in a colossal worldwide outage believed to have been triggered by changes in Domain Naming Systems.
The first outages were reported by cell phone users from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile at 11.30am EST on Monday.
Less than ten minutes later, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – which are all owned by Facebook – were down. They remained dysfunctional at 2pm.
The cause of then outage is unconfirmed and it’s unclear if all are linked but not long before Facebook’s entities went down, entries for Facebook and Instagram were removed from the DNS it uses.
A DNS is essentially an internet directory. Whenever someone opens a link or an app, their device has to search the DNS used by the service they are trying to access to find it and then connect them to it.
Major DNS providers are Google, Amazon and CloudFare. It’s unclear if all of the sites and services that went down on Monday use the same DNS or not.
Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T – all major cellular services – are currently down, leaving tens of thousands of users worldwide without service
All outages are centered in major US cities, including New York City, Los Angles, California and Dallas Texas, while those in the UK and parts of Europe are also experiencing issues.
Down Detector, an online service that monitors outages, shows reports for each of the cellular networks began to start just minutes after all of Facebook’s apps crashed.
Some speculate that the outages are connected, but none of the companies have confirmed.
