ASHEBORO NC – Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp are all down this morning as of 9AM. Staff at Acme News confirmed the outage by trying to access the sites from multiple devices on different internet connections. Down Detector is showing multiple sites down as of 1PM and many other websites are reporting issues as well.
UPDATE (10/4/21 12PM) – At 12:22 PM Facebook release a statement on Twitter saying that they are aware that some people are having trouble accessing their apps and products and they are working to get things back to normal.
UPDATE (10/5/21 2PM) – Yesterday Facebook (and all its associated apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp) disappeared from the internet for several hours. The outage’s effects weren’t just limited to Facebook and its apps, with Facebook being used to sign in to many other apps and websites the outage led to a cascade of related issues with people not being able to log into websites, sign into their devices including some smart TVs and internet connected thermostats.
News of the outage first started to spread at around 11AM EST, and despite some users being able to temporarily access some of the affected sites, overall the outage lasted over 5 hours. On Monday afternoon Facebook said that the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” The company has apologized to its users saying “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.”
The New York Times reported that it wasn’t just the public who was affected by the outage. According to their reporting internal tools for the Facebook employees went down including trouble making phone calls from company issued cellphones or receiving emails from people outside the company. They also reported that some employees were not able to enter the building using their digital badges and engineers not being able to access the data centers they needed to access the servers to work to fix the issue.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world and is the third most visited site on the internet behind Google and YouTube. Its hard to comprehend just how far reaching this outage was. During the second quarter of 2021, Facebook reported almost 1.9 billion daily active users and 2.89 billion monthly active users according to data on Statista.
The outage comes on at a bad time for the social media company. Whistle-blower Frances Haugen who was a former Facebook product manager who worked on thousands of pages of internal research revealing that Facebook knew that its apps were harmful to including that Instagram made teenage girls feel worse about themselves. Haugen has since distributed those documents to lawmakers, news outlets, and government agencies and recently appeared on 60 Minutes calling the social media company “morally bankrupt” and calling for more regulation for the site. Haugen is scheduled to testify before congress later this week.
The internet did not take sympathy on Facebook, the hashtag #facebookdown quickly spread on Twitter with a flood of memes directed at Facebook.