“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said.

So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as a primary mode of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it. Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Madory said it appears Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Facebook’s request Monday that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services seemed to ring a bit hollow. It also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”īut the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties - to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.įacebook’s only public comment so far was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and that it was working on restoring access. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. “This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company.

Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hourslong global disruptions are rare. The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down. Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms suffered a worldwide outage Monday that has extended more than three hours.

Facebook and whatsapp outage