Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are down for hours

 

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp worldwide are down for four hours, and counting is in a catastrophic outage - experts say the internal error is to blame employees' closed from offices at California HQ.'

The first reports of platform problems came from tens of thousands of users at 4.44 pm (11:44 ET)

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger are all reported problems and are still ongoing.

Mobile internet services for users of the UK phone network EE and other networks in the US are also affected.

Shortly after the first report, the hashtag #facebookdown was trending on Twitter.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger are down for users worldwide, with the first report of issues coming out this afternoon.

According to DownDetector, the problems started around 16:44 GMT (11:44 ET), with nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook.

NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, estimates that the outage has already cost the global economy $160m (£117m) and sent Facebook's stock price down more than five percent.

Facebook has not confirmed the exact cause of the outage, but an expert said an internal error could cause the problem.

John Graham Cunningham, chief technology officer of web security firm Cloudflare, said Facebook made a series of updates to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), causing it to 'disappear' from the Internet.

BGP allows routing information to be exchanged on the Internet and takes people to websites they want to access.

Dane Knecht, the company's senior vice president, said earlier that Facebook's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes had been "pulled from the Internet."

Cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont wrote on Twitter: ``This sounds like a very epic configuration bug; Facebook is not online at the moment. Even trusted name servers domains have been pulled from BGP.

Facebook employees were reportedly unable to get to their offices today to assess the extent of the outage because their security clearances were not working.

According to experts, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, all owned by Facebook, operate on common back-end infrastructure, creating a 'single point of failure.'

It wasn't just the leading Facebook apps, but other services, including Facebook Workplace and the Oculus website, were also down.

In recent months, there have been several social media outages, with Instagram dropping just 16 hours last month and all Facebook platforms going offline in June.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, seemed to shed light on Facebook's plight this evening. In response to a post that appeared to show how the facebook.com domain is up for sale due to the outage, he jokingly asked, "How much?"

Users around the world have reported problems with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Downdetector.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, seemed to shed light on Facebook's plight this evening. In response to a post that appeared to show how the facebook.com domain is up for sale due to the outage, he jokingly asked, "How much?"

The cause of the outage is uncertain, and it is not clear if they are all related. Still, shortly before the Facebook entities crash, Facebook and Instagram entries were removed from the Domain Name System (DNS) it uses.

DNS is an internet directory. Whenever someone opens a link or an app, their devices have to search the DNS used by the service they're trying to access to find it and then connect them to it.

The primary DNS providers are Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare. It's unclear whether or not all of the sites and services that crashed on Monday were using the same DNS.

A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc led to the shutdown of multiple websites in July.

Cloudflare's Graham-Cunningham tweeted on Monday that Facebook had accidentally 'disappeared' from the Internet after making a series of updates to the BGP - Border Gateway Protocol.

"Between 15:50 UTC and 15:52 UTC [4.50-4.52pm UK time], Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a series of BGP updates," he said.

When sites go down due to failures in their DNS systems, CloudFare tries to fix them.

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