Facebook And Related Sites Go Down, Chaos Ensues

Facebook, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, have gone offline and it appears to be not just a glitch.

Graphic property of Facebook, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Washington Post:

Facebook and many apps in its suite of social media and chat services went dark for hours Monday in a widespread outage that appeared to affect users globally.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger were unreachable for many users, who instead saw a spinning wheel on their apps that never loaded.

Facebook’s internal communication platform, Workplace, went down altogether, said a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. As employees turned to third-party tools such as Slack, many found themselves locked out of even those, because Facebook’s mechanism for signing on to them was not working said another person familiar with the matter who spoke under the same conditions.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone tweeted that the company was aware of the issues and was “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Reports on Downdetector suggest users across the United States, in Egypt, in Serbia and many other places were impacted. The issues began at about 11:39 a.m. Eastern time.

“Something happened internally at Facebook that messed with their network settings on how Facebook talks to the rest of the world and accesses the Internet,” said Courtney Nash, senior research analyst at security company Verica.

The issue seems to be with Facebook’s border gateway protocol routes, or paths that allow routers to exchange information, said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company. Madory calls them the “underpinnings of how the Internet operates.”

Brian Krebs offers a preliminary explainer:

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

The mass outage comes just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

We don’t know how or why the outages persist at Facebook and its other properties, but the changes had to have come from inside the company, as Facebook manages those records internally. Whether the changes were made maliciously or by accident is anyone’s guess at this point.

Obviously, this is a developing story and probably one that will have some twists and turns as information comes out. Until then, second look at My Space?