All of Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – are experiencing a worldwide outage that is impacting thousands of users.
DownDetector, an website that monitors online outages, shows issue reports surfaced around 11:30am ET, with the most flooding in 30 minutes later.
Users cite problems with both the website and app for each platform, along with the inability to post on Facebook and Instagram.
The outage comes just a little over one month since Facebook and Instagram were down for seven hours due to a DNS (Domain Naming System) issue.
All of Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – are experiencing a worldwide outage that is impacting thousands of users
The outages are hitting major cities in the US including New York City, Los Angeles and Dallas.
Across the Atlantic, the UK, Spain and other European countries are also being shown on DownDetector as impacted by the crash.
Meta has yet to acknowledged the outage, so it is not clear what has caused the platforms to crash or when they will be back online.
Users logging into to Facebook are seeing ‘Sorry something went wrong’ error messages, some Instagram users are opening the app to see a black screen.
DownDetector, an website that monitors online outages, shows issue reports surfaced around 11:30am ET, with the most flooding in 30 minutes later. Pictured is a map of the US, with red highlighting areas impacted by the outage
Users cite problems with both the website and app for each platform, along with the inability to post on Facebook and Instagram. Pictured is a map of the US, with red highlighting areas impacted by the outage
While waiting to hear from Meta, it should be remembered that in recent weeks its services have malfunctioned multiple times that have led to several outages.
The latest even happened on November 3, which saw Facebook, Instagram and Messenger crash for three hours and before that Facebook and Instagram went down on October 8.
However, neither compare to the fiasco on October 4 when all four of Meta’s services crashed for seven hours.
Meta has yet to acknowledged the outage, so it is not clear what has caused the platforms to crash or when they will be back online. Users are flocking to Twitter to see if others are having the same issues
Users logging into to Facebook are seeing ‘Sorry something went wrong’ error messages, some Instagram users are opening the app to see a black screen
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger were knocked offline around 11:50AM ET and remained down until around 6pmET that Monday.
The crash was due to issues with Meta’s DNS.
Instagram users are seeing a black screen when opening the app
The company does not use CloudFare but it runs one of the world’s largest DNS resolvers. When sites go down because of failures in DNS systems, CloudFare tries to repair them.
Usman Muzaffar, SVP of engineering at CloudFare, told DailyMail.com at the time: ‘Humans access information online through domain names, like facebook.com and DNS converts it into numbers, called an IP address, computers use.
‘From what we understand of the actual issue —it is a globalized BGP configuration issue. In our experience, these usually are mistakes, not attacks.
‘Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol for the Internet. Much like the post office processing mail, BGP picks the most efficient routes for delivering Internet traffic.
‘Today, the directions for how to get to Facebook’s DNS server’s addresses weren’t available (and seem to still be unavailable).
‘Without being able to contact the DNS servers, visitors trying to reach a Facebook property, like facebook.com, will not get an answer and so the page won’t load.’
Initially, there were reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were all down too – however those reports stemmed from people being unable to access Facebook-run apps on their mobile devices.
NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, estimate the outage cost the global economy $160 million, and sent the Facebook share price down by more than five per cent – meaning that the firm’s founder Mark Zuckerberg lost around $7 billion of his fortune in a matter of hours.
