6Foot2 Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Link: Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram suffer outage - BBC News Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have been hit by an outage lasting more than an hour. All three services are owned by Facebook and could not be accessed over the web or smartphone apps. Downdetector, which tracks outages, logged nearly 80,000 reports for WhatsApp and more than 50,000 for Facebook. Data from the website suggests the outage is affecting user accounts across the world. Some people also reported problems using Facebook's virtual reality headset platform, Oculus. Facebook said: "We are aware some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience." No official reason for the problem was given. Online network experts speculated it may involve an error with DNS, or the domain name system, for Facebook sites. DNS is often compared to an address book or phone book for the internet, pointing web browsers to the computer system which serves the website they are looking for. Previous issues with DNS led to widespread outages of several major sites earlier this year. In one of those instances, it emerged that the blackout was caused by a single customer of a widely-used service who changed their settings, triggering a software bug affecting a huge number of websites. It is rare for such problems to affect a single tech giant such as Facebook, or for the issue to remain unfixed for a long time.
jthompson Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Now that they're back up, I bet nobody is posting memes about Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. 1
DrBeaker Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 My god....people will actually have to talk to one another and have a conversation for a change [emoji12]
Norphy Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 (edited) Bah, can’t embed gif. ‘And nothing of any value was lost’ Edited October 4, 2021 by Norphy
Guest ZFarnworth Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 My god....people will actually have to talk to one another and have a conversation for a change [emoji12] [emoji23] I’m definitely suffering, I wanted to see how many likes I got on my latest post [emoji22]
computer_expert Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Anyone found the blue Cisco console cable yet? 1
Jcx500 Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 (edited) I believe it’s something do with their bgp setup from what I’ve seen on Twitter Edited October 4, 2021 by Jcx500
elsiegee40 Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 I believe it’s something do with their bgp setup from what I’ve seen on Twitter [ATTACH]63285[/ATTACH] Error or malicious interference one wonders…
6Foot2 Posted October 4, 2021 Author Posted October 4, 2021 Link: Give Amazon and Facebook a Seat at the United Nations - Bloomberg Given the scope of their ambitions and our dependence on them, behemoth brands should be treated, and held to account, for what they really are: commercial superpowers...
mikeprice Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Apparently one national newspaper (I use the word in a loose manner) is having a headline of The Day the Internet Broke JUST HOW MANY TIMES DO i HAVE TO EXPLAIN!!!! sigh along with someone posting on a web forum about how 'all social media' is down - luckily the usual suspect on the site pointed out the problem before I had to!!! apparently some people have had to resort to communicating by text!!!!
6Foot2 Posted October 4, 2021 Author Posted October 4, 2021 Error or malicious interference one wonders… Link: https://twitter.com/BenjaminEnfield/status/1445104389014835213
jthompson Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Well, I think those of us who've spent a decent amount of time on EduGeek would be able to tell the folks over at Facebook engineering that server problems are quite often just a DNS issue. Running "ipconfig /flushdns" is always worth a shot and can sometimes save you from having to restart your global social media platform.
elsiegee40 Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-and-oculus-are-down-heres-what-we-know/ Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook: DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service that translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn't know how to get to the servers that host the website you're looking for. The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 failures (no server is available for the request) instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not. A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.) With no BGP routes into Facebook's network, Facebook's own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR. If the BGP routes for a given network are missing or incorrect, nobody outside that network can find it. Not long after that, Reddit user u/ramenporn reported on the r/sysadmin subreddit that BGP peering with Facebook is down, probably due to a configuration change that was pushed shortly before the outages began. According to u/ramenporn—who claims to be a Facebook employee and part of the recovery efforts—this is most likely a case of Facebook network engineers pushing a config change that inadvertently locked them out, meaning that the fix must come from data center technicians with local, physical access to the routers in question. The withdrawn routes do not appear to be the result of nor related to any malicious attack on Facebook's infrastructure.
elsiegee40 Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Blog post from Cloudflare: Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet Useful reading for those of us who aren’t fluent in BGP (including me) https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/ 2
Protec Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Facebook still not working at all on desktop. Won't connect at all. Messenger won't work on phone or desktop, feed won't refresh on mobile. Instagram is the same. I'm surprised to see such a significant outage and for it to last this amount of time! I know local businesses who rely on Facebook messenger for communication with clients such as the local driving instructor. Not good for anyone who relies on Facebook for business!
aicrd Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 I still cannot get any DNS records at all for facebook.com or instagram. Or facebookmail.com. It looks like this outage is going to go on a lot longer. BGP issues like this take a while to resolve, especially when they dont even have the right staff in the DC due to covid!
elsiegee40 Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 Cloudflare’s Chief Technical Officer says there are early signs of life https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1445136845986308100?s=21
Protec Posted October 4, 2021 Posted October 4, 2021 (edited) Not looking good still. Same for Instagram Edited October 4, 2021 by Protec
Jcx500 Posted October 5, 2021 Posted October 5, 2021 https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/
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