Major global outage hits WhatsApp and Facebook
Users trying to access Facebook on desktops might get the below message on their browser:
The social media giant tweeted the following as a response to the outage:
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Instagram feeds are not refreshing and messages, voice notes, and video calls are not working on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp commented on Twitter: "We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!"
Instagram responded in a similar fashion: "Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them,” it wrote on its communications page. “Bear with us, we’re on it!"
The chat app is currently trending on Twitter as many users of the social media platform flocked to the site to lament their issues with the Facebook-owned platforms.
That moment when so many things go down that https://t.co/TzZ2whbz8r also goes down pic.twitter.com/XRdpBp04Ae
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) October 4, 2021
Facebook spokesperson commented on Twitter: "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
The exact cause of the outage is not yet known. This is a developing story.
Update - Network configuration the culprit
Facebook's engineering team wrote in a blog post what caused the outage. According to the post, network configuration is the culprit, adding that it found no evidence that user data was compromised during the downtime.
The team wrote:
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient. "
