Meta, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all experiencing an outage worldwide that has impacted thousands of users.
DownDetector is a website that tracks online outages. It shows issues reported around 11:11 AM ET and the worst flooding 30 minutes later.
The website as well as the apps for each platform are presented with problems by users. Users also report inability of posting on Facebook or Instagram.
This outage is just one month after Instagram and Facebook were offline for 7 hours because of a DNS (Domain Naming System).
Meta’s three platforms: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and WhatsApp are currently experiencing outages that affect thousands of people worldwide
Major US cities, including New York City and Los Angeles are affected by the outages.
DownDetector is showing other European countries, including the UK and Spain, as having been impacted by this crash.
Meta has not yet acknowledged that the platform went down. It is unclear what caused it or when it will come back up.
Facebook logins are showing ‘Sorry it went wrong’ errors messages. Instagram users may also be seeing black screens when they open the app.
DownDetector monitors outage online. Issue reports were visible around 11:30am ET. The most flooding occurred 30 minutes later. Below is a map showing the United States, highlighted in red to highlight areas that were affected by the outage.
The website as well as the app are not working properly for users. They also complain about inability to upload on Facebook or Instagram. Below is a map showing the United States, highlighted in red to highlight areas that were affected by the outage.
It is important to remember that Meta’s services have been experiencing multiple malfunctions in the past weeks, resulting in several outages.
Facebook, Messenger and Instagram crashed for three hours on November 3. Before that Facebook and Instagram were down on October 8.
But neither can compare with the October 4th fiasco, when Meta’s four services went down for seven hours.
Meta has not yet acknowledged that the platform went down. It is unclear what caused it or when it will come back up. Twitter users are crowding onto the platform to check if other people are experiencing similar issues
Facebook users who log in to the site are receiving ‘Sorry, something went wrong’ error messages. Some Instagram users open the app to view a black screen.
Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp were all taken offline by Facebook at around 11.50 AM ET. They remained online until Monday around 6pm ET.
Meta’s DNS was the cause of the crash.
When opening Instagram, users see a black screen
CloudFare is not used by the company, but they do have one of world’s most powerful DNS resolvers. CloudFare repairs sites that go down due to DNS system problems.
CloudFare SVP Engineering Usman Muzaffar stated at the time that: “Humans have access to information online through domains, such as facebook.com, and DNS converts them into numbers, which are called IP addresses, computers use.
‘From what we understand of the actual issue —it is a globalized BGP configuration issue. We have found that these are often mistakes rather than attacks.
BGP is the Internet’s routing protocol. BGP, which is similar to how the post office processes mail, chooses the fastest routes to transport Internet traffic.
‘Today’s directions on how to reach Facebook’s DNS server addresses are not yet available.
“Visitors trying to access a Facebook property such as facebook.com will not be able to get an answer from the DNS servers and the page will not load.”
Initially, there were reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were all down too – however those reports stemmed from people being unable to access Facebook-run apps on their mobile devices.
NetBlocks tracks outages on the internet and the impact they have. It estimates that this outage cost $160 million to the world economy and caused the Facebook share price to drop by over five percent. This meant Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the company, lost $7 billion in just a few hours.