Facebook and Instagram coming back online
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are coming back online. Services remain slow, but many users around the world are reporting that they can access their social media platform again.
DNS servers struggling under heavy traffic
A ripple effect is in progress as DNS servers around the world suffer from a large increase in queries from people trying (and failing) to connect to Facebook. It is impacting the performance of all DNS internet servers.
Cloudflare DNS server at 1.1.1.1 and Google’s DNS server at 8.8.8.8 are only just managing with the traffic.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all offline
Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp are experiencing a major outage as users worldwide cannot access any of the three popular social media platforms.
Details are still emerging about the outage, but many users have taken to Twitter to report that they are experiencing issues accessing all three websites/apps without success.
The outage has affected users all around the world and started just after 3:00 pm GMT.
#facebookdown is now the number one trending hashtag on Twitter, as many users try to find out why they cannot access the platforms. #instagramdown and #whatsappdown are the other two trending hashtags as users focus on their remaining social media accounts to try and find out what is going on.
Technical details of the outage are starting to emerge that show DNS records for facebook.com and instagram.com have been withdrawn from the global routing tables.
In a Reddit post, a user claiming to be involved in restoring services commented that the outage occurred because of a bad configuration change pushed to Facebook peering routers. The problem compounds, though, because restoring these routers will require physical access to thousands of routers around the world.
If this is confirmed to be the case it can be expected that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will remain offline for some time.
This is a developing story and will be updated throughout the day.
