WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook 'coming back online' after global outage
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are "coming back online" after the sites were down for several hours on Monday.
Users across the globe experienced issues getting on to them from around 5pm.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, reported at around 11.30pm that services were coming back online.
In a statement on Twitter, the company apologised and said it had been working hard to fix the issue.
"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us."
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said it may take some time for services to get back to 100%.
Mr Schroepfer said: "Facebook services coming back online now - may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry."
Earlier, the platforms confirmed on Twitter that they were aware of issues and were working to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday.
Security experts speculated the problem came following network changes, with the cause still unconfirmed by late Monday evening.
Adam Leon Smith, of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and a software testing expert, said: “The outage is caused by changes made to the Facebook network infrastructure.
“Many of the recent high-profile outages have been caused by similar network level events.
“It is reported by unidentified Facebook sources on Reddit that the network changes have also prevented engineers from remotely connecting to resolve the issues, delaying resolution.
“Notably, many organisations now define their physical infrastructure as code, but most do not apply the same level of testing rigour when they change that code, as they would when changing their core business logic.”
Every now and then I fall apart. #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/jzsWCQXkoZ
— Bonnie Tyler (@BonnieTOfficial) October 4, 2021
However, cyber security specialist Jake Moore said there is a “chance” the issue could be related to a cyber attack.
He told the PA news agency: “There have been many reports and I’m struggling to find out exactly what has happened- I’m reading it could be DNS related, which means there is an issue with the connection not knowing where to go to your device.
“It could well be a human error or a software bug lurking in the shadows but whatever it is Facebook needs to do its best to mitigate the problem of causing more panic about this.
“The biggest problem is fears over a cyber attack but as we saw from Fastly in the summer I would hedge my bets on that not being the case as we’re talking about one of the biggest companies in the world, but there’s always a chance.” The New York Times reported the issue likely stemmed from a misconfiguration of Facebook’s server computers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp.
It said the problems appeared to be more complex and required some manual updating.
The error message on Facebook's webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error.
DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations.
DownDetector, a website outage tracker, is showing outages around the world including here in Ireland.
Data on its website showed that almost 50,000 people had reported the outages on Facebook.
Most complaints cited issues with the website (72%), while others were linked to issues with the server connection and the app.
More than 60,000 had complained about WhatsApp, with 43% reporting issues with the app itself, while 28% cited the server connection and 28% relating to sending messages.
More than 30,000 Instagram users also had similar complaints, with 51% relating to the app, 26% over the server connection and 23% citing the website.
A graph on the DownDetector website showed a clear spike from after 4pm.
Facebook’s share price plummeted 4.9% amid the outage, which also came the day after a whistleblower claimed in a US interview that the company prioritises its own interests over the public good.
The platforms were affected by outages in 2019- in an incident which saw #FacebookDown, #instagramdown and #whatsappdown trending worldwide on Twitter.
A few months prior, users of Facebook and Instagram reported being unable to open pages or sections on the apps.
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.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021
A spokesperson for Facebook said the social media giant is aware of the problem.
"We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," they said.
"We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Whatsapp said 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 said: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it.”
The Chief Technology Officer at Facebook offered “sincere apologies” to the people who have been impacted by the outages.
“We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible,” Mike Schroepfer said in a tweet.
The outage is also having an impact on Vodafone Ireland's data network.
They tweeted to say: "There is currently a global outage across several social media platforms. This is impacting our data network performance. We will continue to post updates as they become available."
The issue also affected other platforms such as Twitter amid an increase in traffic on its website and app.
Twitter Support tweeted: “Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned.
“Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!” It had earlier joked: “Hello literally everyone.”