Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Unavailable for 6 Hours
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were out for six hours straight globally. People and businesses using said platforms were in chaos during the outage. The outage took place at noon Eastern time, and it was highlighted as the most significant failure of its kind, according to Downdetector.
The outage was a massive blog just days after the social media giant was accused of prioritizing profit over clamping down on misinformation and hate speech by a whistleblower. After the whistleblower’s accusation, Facebook’s trade dropped, dropping even further by 5.3% after the outage.
According to security experts, the disruption was caused by an internal mistake. However, there is a possibility that this could have been caused by a case of sabotage by an insider.
While there are theories about what happened, cybercrime reporter Brian Krebs revealed that the outage resulted from a DNS problem. According to Krebs, the DNS records that tell devices how to find Instagram and Facebook were withdrawn from the global routing cables. It is unclear how this happened at this time. More can be found about Kreb’s analysis here.
On the flip side, the New York Times reported that Facebook was unaware of the root cause of the problem. Facebook security experts were attempting to identify the problem while employees were briefed about the ongoing issue. Two security team members who spoke anonymously stated that the outage was unlikely to be caused by a cyberattack as something like that could not affect so many apps simultaneously.
It is worth noting that apart from Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, Facebook’s internal workplace and all associated services were also suffering from an outage, as highlighted by Jane Manchun Wong. To remedy the situation, Facebook employees turned to platforms like FaceTime and Discord for communication.
While Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are live, there are concerns that user data might be compromised. The company has gone on record to state that no user data has been compromised.
Surprisingly, outages are often resolved quickly, but not in Facebook’s case, which was highly unusual. Facebook already started the week on a bad note, and the outage only made things worse. To find out more about the Facebook outage, stay tuned with Ivacy VPN.
