(Independent)
FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM AND WHATSAPP COMING BACK ONLINE AFTER HUGE OUTAGE
INDEPENDENT
Andrew Griffin
Facebook and its apps appear to be coming back online after a huge outage.
Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the main Facebook app had all been offline for more than six hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.
The problems also affected Facebook’s own internal services – apparently leaving it unable to properly address the outage – and the additional web traffic sent to rivals such as Twitter and Telegram meant that they slowed down dramatically.
Telegram slows down: Users complain about messaging app as people rush from WhatsApp and Messenger
It is likely that any fixes will take some time to filter out and users could still be hit by problems long after any fix is in place, given the relatively large and unwieldy of the infrastructure underpinning a company like Facebook as well as the many other apps it runs.
As Facebook came back online, for instance, users reported that they were seeing “login error code two”, which the company uses to alert them to connection errors. Some Instagram feeds failed to load and WhatsApp often span around with a “connecting” message.
But even that was a marked improvement from the array of error messages and unloaded pages that greeted users of Facebook and its other services around the world through much of Tuesday.
The technical issues are likely to prove vastly expensive. Facebook’s turnover equated to roughly $10 million an hour last year – and many other external companies rely heavily on the app, Instagram and WhatsApp to conduct their business.
Facebook’s problems appeared to be related to the domain name system, or DNS. That is often referred to as the phone book of the internet, taking the URL a person types into their browser – such as Facebook.com – and turning it into a numerical address that can then be asked for the data that makes up the website being accessed.
The company runs its own DNS, unlike many other smaller firms. As such, it is at liberty to make changes itself – and to remove those records, too, which was what seemed to have happened at some point on Monday.
Without the correct DNS configurations, browsers were unable to access the Facebook website, and apps could not properly call the servers needed to fill up Instagram with new posts or WhatsApp with new messages.
In all, a vast array of Facebook of services went down. They included not just its large apps but virtual reality platform Oculus, and office social network Workplace.
The issues probably affected companies beyond Facebook too, given that many other platforms rely on its tools – such as the ability to log in with a Facebook account – to run their own websites.
Indeed, the issues were so widespread that many presumed that the internet had simply gone down entirely. Users of phone and internet companies across the UK, US and beyond complained that they had been taken offline, but those complaints appeared to be a result of the fact that Facebook simply makes up so much of the internet.
Facebook also relies heavily on its own systems to power the company itself, and so its internal workplace forum and communications tools were hit by the outages too.
The problems meant that some Facebook employees seemed to enjoy the time off. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, declared that it “does feel like a snow day” on Twitter.
But the fact that the technical problems had also caused issues within Facebook also presumably made them vastly more difficult to fix. Reports said that the company had been forced to send engineers to physically access the problem servers, because they were unable to access them remotely as they might expect to.