Facebook down - live updates: Company explains outage as WhatsApp, Instagram and other apps come back online

Facebook and its apps appear to be coming back online after its hugeMonday outage.

Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the main Facebook app had all been offline for more than five hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.

Andrew Griffin has the story.

Gmail, TikTok and Snapchat users have complained that the apps are slowing down amid the continued outage of Facebook companies.

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all stopped working at the same time of Monday, forcing their 3bn users to flood across to other social media platforms.

And many of those apps then themselves saw significant slowdowns as they dealt with mass sign-ups and log-ins as Facebook remained unavailable.

There are rumours whipping around the internet that, among other things, Facebook has been “deleted”, that it has been “hacked”, that is has “gone”. The truth appears to be a little less dramatic – though still plenty dramatic.

Essentially, Facebook has deleted its DNS, or the address book that helps people find its websites. When someone types “Facebook.com” into a web browser, the DNS should be able to provide it with the numerical address to get the data that represents the website. But that DNS is broken, so the web browser gets lost, and you get an error message. (The same thing happens, effectively, with the app, although not in such an obvious way.)

That’s so widespread because Facebook controls its DNS. And Facebook does that on behalf of all the services it owns: WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Workplace, Oculus, and more besides. So everything has broken, all at once.

What’s more, Facebook also heavily relies on its own systems internally. So, for example, the fact the DNS isn’t working means that those engineers who should be able to fix it also can’t access it. That’s why staffers are now reportedly being sent to actual physical data centres to try and make things work again. And that’s where we are now.

To borrow an analogy from earlier, it is as if we (or our web browsers) have turned up at the Facebook office in the hope of getting into one of its many rooms. But the receptionist who usually keeps the record of which room is which is gone – they’ve been deleted – and so you’re stuck outside with no idea where to go.

Inside those rooms are not only Facebook but every Facebook property, which together makes up much of the internet. And all the people who would normally be able to hire a new receptionist can’t find their way around the building, too. We’re all stuck outside, looking in, even those people who would normally be on the inside.

It’s now been five hours since Facebook lost its receptionist. And there’s no sense when they’ll return.

Everything is having a bit of trouble, presumably as many more people than usual switch to it to make up for lack of Facebook. Like Telegram, Twitter is struggling.

Our full story is here.

As Messenger, WhatsApp and other Facebook chat services break, some people have turned to Telegram. So many people, in fact, that it seems to be struggling – while it’s still working, it’s doing so much more slowly than usual.

Read the full story here.

Some details of what exactly has gone wrong, and how Facebook is rushing to fix it, do appear to be coming through. This, from security researcher Steve Gibson, offers something of a picture, though it’s not clear where it’s come from

If this is the case, it means in short that a version of that address book we discussed earlier* has been deleted. But to put it back in place, those working remotely from the relevant servers need the address book to find where they’re going. You can see the difficulty.

Most likely, the fix would require actually going to those servers, and doing the work to get them going again. That’s probably what’s happening right now as Facebook engineers struggle to fix everything.

*Scroll down to the post after the one after this one if you want a pained analogy to explain all this.

Some details of what exactly has gone wrong, and how Facebook is rushing to fix it, do appear to be coming through. This, from security researcher Steve Gibson, offers something of a picture, though it’s not clear where it’s come from

If this is the case, it means in short that a version of that address book we discussed earlier* has been deleted. But to put it back in place, those working remotely from the relevant servers need the address book to find where they’re going. You can see the difficulty.

Most likely, the fix would require actually going to those servers, and doing the work to get them going again. That’s probably what’s happening right now as Facebook engineers struggle to fix everything.

*Scroll down to the post after the one after this one if you want a pained analogy to explain all this.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, has posted his first tweet about the outage.

The wording is much the same as Facebook’s statement much earlier on, and gives no new information. But the fact it’s being posted at all probably says something about how hectic things must be at Facebook at the minute.

Facebook appears to have had its DNS records taken from the global routing tables. That’s according to Brian Krebs, a cyber security expert who runs a popular blog.

In slightly less nerdy speak, that means that effectively Facebook.com, Instagram.com and presumably the rest have had their records wiped from the internet’s address book. When you type one of those URLs into your internet browser, it should be able to speak to Facebook and ask it where it needs to go – but the system that does so has been withdrawn.

It’s like turning up at the Facebook office for a meeting but the receptionist isn’t there. You (or your computer) are just stuck at the desk, since you (or it) don’t know the number of the office door you’re trying to get to. (Or something like that analogy.)

It’s not clear why that happened. Facebook is so big that it runs its own DNS – unlike other, smaller companies – so only someone at Facebook would have the power to stop it running, too.

Here’s Krebs saying much the same thing, in a more legitimate way:

Taking advantage of the outage, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joked that people should use the opportunity to share “our favorite stories of democracy working in hopeful ways and coolest evidence-based reporting”. Examples can be found in the replies to the tweet below.