Facebook is down, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus VR.
Posted 4th October 2021.
Social media giant Facebook who also owns WhatsApp and Instagram has all been hit by an outage lasting more than an hour this afternoon.
All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or smartphone apps.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, logged nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook earlier today.
Data from the website suggests the outage is affecting user accounts across the globe.
Some people also reported problems using Facebook’s virtual reality headset platform, Oculus.
Facebook commented by saying: “We are aware some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
No official reason for the problem was given.
Online IT experts speculated it may involve an error with DNS records, or the domain name system, for Facebook sites and apps.
DNS is a string of commands that directs the domain name to an internet protocol (IP address) often compared to an address book or phone book for the internet, pointing web browsers to the computer server system which hosts the website they are looking for.
Previous issues with DNS led to widespread outages of several major sites earlier this year.
In one of those instances, it emerged that the blackout was caused by a single customer of a widely-used service who changed their settings, triggering a software bug affecting a huge number of websites.
It is unusual for such problems to occur affecting a single tech giant such as Facebook, or for the issue to remain unfixed for a long length of time.
Unfortunately for Facebook several other tech companies, including LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter, have jumped on the bandwagon to make fun at the social media giant’s expense.
This is very frustrating for the business owners that only have Facebook pages and Facebook groups to trade from as many feel having a website to be too costly hence rely on the cheaper option of a social media page.
This now should be a lesson learned for all businesses not to keep all their eggs in one basket and always have a backup plan should something like this happen again. For my clients, I always build a website, blog, and social media page, essentially creating an SEO link wheel.
I only use Facebook for business to market other people’s businesses and as it happens I was about to create a Facebook page for a client to compliment his website only to find an error message. I automatically thought I had a problem with the internet only to go on Linkedin to read all the tongue-in-cheek comments and that is when I clocked on what had happened.
Facebook Andy Stone Tweet.
Andy Stone, from Facebook’s communications department, 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.”
Further Reading:
“Somebody has egg on their face, is never going to live this down, and has now a massive dent in their pocket”.
#facebook #facebookoutage #facebookerror #instagram #instagramoutage #whatsapp #whatsappoutage
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