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- Facebook and Instagram have been down for hours and everyone is wondering why.
- Internal systems at the social media giant are reportedly down, leaving employees having to find different ways to communicate.
- Be sure to check out more of the latest news about Facebook here.
Facebook, and other major services the media giant owns including Instagram and Whatsapp, have been down for the majority of the day on October 4. The first outages were noticed just after 11:00 AM EST on Monday.
Facebook and Instagram semi-regularly go down for brief stints of time, but this entire situation appears to be much different. According to Jim Salter of Arstechnica, Facebook’s DNS – Domain Name System – appeared broken this morning. Without a DNS, your computer, tablet, or smartphone can’t get to the servers that host the website.
So, @facebook's DNS is broken this morning…
TL;DR: Google anycast DNS returns SERVFAIL for Facebook queries; querying https://t.co/0BDgaIHmlr directly times out. pic.twitter.com/3GHJ3mW0P0
— Jim Salter (aka @jimsalter@fosstodon.org) 🐀 (@jrssnet) October 4, 2021
https://twitter.com/BenjaminEnfield/status/1445104389014835213?s=20
Why Is Facebook Down Right Now? It’s Complicated
After it was discovered that Facebook’s DNS was broken, Disclose.tv reported that data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum. The information being sold includes names, emails, locations, etc.
According to Disclose, however, the information hack and selling is “completely unrelated” to the Facebook outage itself. The outage is one problem, while the personal data breach is another.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1445090955229646865?s=20
Given the outage, Facebook employees themselves are reportedly having actual trouble just getting inside buildings to help resolve the problems. One source at Facebook told Phil Crowther of the AP that it’s “mayhem” at offices at the moment.
Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.
— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) October 4, 2021
Source at Facebook: "it's mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too." Tells me employees are communicating amongst each other by text and by Outlook email.
— Philip Crowther (@PhCrowther) October 4, 2021
The timing of all of this is extremely interesting given the fact that ’60 Minutes’ aired a groundbreaking piece about a Facebook whistleblower, Francis Haugen, less than 24 hours prior to the outages.
Haugen shared that she saw “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook.” She quit her job at Facebook in May but took various internal documents from the company that paints quite the picture.