Instagram down: Facebook technology head gives update on major outage

Facebook has given another update on the ongoing outage that has also taken down Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

The company’s outgoing chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, apologised to those affected and said the company was still working to fix it.

“*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” he wrote on Twitter.

“We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

:: Follow our live coverage of the outage here ::

The update came more than three hours into an outage that at the time of publication showed no signs of letting up or being fixed.

Mr Schroepfer gave little detailed information on the problems themselves, or when exactly they might be fixed. Facebook is often reticent to explain its outages – when it suffered its longest ever outage, in 2019, it said only that the problems were “a result of a server configuration change”.

But the reference to “networking issues” may lend credence to ongoing speculation that Facebook has accidentally broken its own domain name system, or DNS, often referred to as the address book of the internet. Without that, web browsers are unable to get directions to the right site, and so the site and apps are unable to load.

Mr Schroepfer’s post was largely similar to the one given in a post from the official Facebook account on Twitter earlier on.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” it said. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

That came around the same time that the official Instagram accounts posted its own updates.

“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them,” it wrote. “Bear with us, we’re on it!”

WhatsApp said much the same.

“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment,” it wrote on its official account. “We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”

Mr Schroepfer is something of a Facebook veteran, having worked at the company for 13 years. Mark Zuckerberg announced last month that he would be leaving his position as chief technology officer at some point in the next year, transitioning to become a “Senior Fellow”.

He will be replaced by another veteran of Facebook, Andrew Bosworth, who has most recently led Facebook’s efforts on augmented and virtual reality.