Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp down
Category
Vulnerabilities, Social Engineering
Risk Level
What we know:
Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and other Facebook Inc. services were down Monday morning starting around 11:30 AM ET. Twitter accounts for the respective services confirmed issues around 12:30.
What may have happened:
updated at 14:28 EST
One theory of what is causing the outage is a DDoS attack incited by a recent 60-Minutes interview with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. A less exciting but more probable theory comes from Arstechnica who surfaced this Reddit post (since removed from the site) where supposed employees were saying that the outage immediately followed a planned configuration update at Facebook.
updated at 14:42 EST
@jgrahamc reported a large number of BGP route withdrawals just five minutes before the outage reports started and then a subsequent rush of rejected queries for Facebook service addresses.
updated 10/5 at 8:12 EST
Facebook Inc. services returned around 5:30 PM ET Monday, concluding the 6 hour outage.
From Facebook’s engineering page:
“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.”
Outside Sources:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
https://downdetector.com/status/facebook/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-and-oculus-are-down-heres-what-we-know/
https://twitter.com/jgrahamc
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