Facebook down - live updates: Company explains outage as WhatsApp, Instagram and other apps come back online
Latest news as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are back up
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WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are now back online after being down for more than six hours in a major outage.
The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm UK time on Monday.
Other related products, such as Facebook Messenger and Workplace, also stopped working.
Facebook has now explained in a detailed blog post what caused the outage - and why it took so long to fix.
It comes as former Facebook product manager and data scientist Frances Haugen testifies before a Senate subcommittee about the company’s research into Instagram’s effect on the mental health of young users.
In June and April this year, the social media giant’s platforms unexpectedly went down due to a “network configuration issue”.
Read our live coverage of the outage below
What is the future of Section 230?
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told lawmakers on Tuesday that simply tweaking Section 230, a law that protects social media companies over what users post, would not be enough to regulate the company.
“While important, these will not get to the core of the issue — which is that no one truly understands the destructive choices made by Facebook except Facebook,” she said. “We can afford nothing less than full transparency.”
Adam Smith took a look at Section 230 for The Independent and what its future may look like.
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Wikipedia, Reddit, Yelp, and many smaller services could struggle as politicians target Facebook, Twitter, and Google
Some Instagram users still seeing issues
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are up and running again after the company’s Monday outage, its worst since 2008, severely impacted its 3bn users worldwide.
But some users are still reporting some issues with Instagram pictures not loading.
What is BGP?
As well as Facebook breaking its DNS access, it also hampered its BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).
DNS is akin to a destination - finding an IP address, such as Facebook or YouTube. BGP is the equivalent of a map, telling someone how to get to that destination.
“A BGP hijack is much like if someone were to change out all the signs on a stretch of freeway and reroute automobile traffic onto incorrect exits”, Cloudflare says.
Facebook has its own BGP system it designed itself, and it appears that in an update, it essentially took itself off the map.
“At 15:58 UTC we noticed that Facebook had stopped announcing the routes to their DNS prefixes. That meant that, at least, Facebook’s DNS servers were unavailable. Because of this Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver could no longer respond to queries asking for the IP address of facebook.com”, Cloudflare says in a dedicated explanation of the outage.
“Meanwhile, other Facebook IP addresses remained routed but weren’t particularly useful since without DNS Facebook and related services were effectively unavailable”
Facebook whistleblower starts testifying
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is now testifying before a Senate hearing, urging the government to regulate the social media company.
Ms Haugen, who spoke in-depth about the company during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, said that the social network repeatedly prioritised “growth over safety” and is “tearing our societies apart”.
MMS messages were up 500 per cent
While Facebook was down, people were sending more messages than they had on New Year’s Eve in 2020, 2019, or 2018.
“As some of the world’s most popular social media platforms went down last night, our network saw a huge spike in SMS traffic as customers switched from apps to more traditional means and our network continued to support them. In fact, between 8:00pm and 9:00pm we carried more SMS than the last three New Year’s Eves – traditionally the busiest time for text”, Carlo Melis, Chief Network Officer at Three UK, said.
“MMS also increased by almost 500 per cent compared to last Monday as people continued to share their selfies with friends and family”,
6
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has posted an enigmatic tweet: “6”
Although it is unclear exactly what this refers to, it is possible that it is a snub at Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped to the sixth richest person on the planet following the outage.
The Independent has reached out to Twitter for clarification.
Telegram saw downloads and sign-ups soar during Facebook outage
Following the global outage that made Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger unusable for six-hours on Monday, the cross-platform messaging app Telegram saw a surge in number of new users.
During the outage, Telegram, whose functionality is similar to that of WhatsApp, became one of the most downloaded app from the 56th position in the US, according to app analyst Sensor Tower.
The messaging app became the 5th most downloaded free app in the US on Monday, preceded only by Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, and Facebook.
Late-night show hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel also mock Facebook over Monday’s outage.
The comedians roasted the social media company, also highlighting the 60 minutes interview of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in which she said the company prioritised its own profits over the public good.
“Not even 12 hours after the #LeaveFacebook started trending on Twitter after the 60 minutes story last night, Facebook seems they may’ve deleted themselves,” Mr Kimmel said in his opening monologue, referring to the outage.
On The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert mocked Facebook that a “just God” was responsible for the outage which made Facebook’s platforms unusable for hours.
Millions flocked to Signal when WhatsApp was down
“Millions of new people” joined the Signal messaging app when WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram were down due to a massive outage on Monday.
During the six-hour long outage that saw $7 billion wiped from Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, Signal said signups on its platform were “on the way up”.
The company tweeted that millions joined the platform during this period, messaging and calling up, but added that some people “aren’t seeing all of their contacts appear on Signal” due to the influx of users.
Compared to Facebook, which plans to centralise and integrate the infrastructure across its platforms, Signal’s basic code is open source and can be examined by security experts outside the company.
You can read more about the differences between the messaging platforms here.
Facebook platforms may continue to face issues as systems come online
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp could continue to experience issues as systems come back online after Monday’s major outage.
“Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100%,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s outgoing chief technology officer, said in a Twitter post.
“To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry,” he added.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations,” Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday.
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