Photo notifications and birthday reminders stopped. As one web analyst told CNN, for a lot of people, “Facebook is the internet.” Facebook alone has almost 3 billion users – more than a third of the world’s population. ( Another, briefer Facebook outage occurred Friday.) Experts say we should do it more oftenįor some six hours Monday, the ripple effects of Facebook’s massive outage reverberated across the US and around the world.įrom Mumbai to Mexico City, billions of people were abruptly cast adrift when Facebook vanished from the internet and its family of platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp, stopped loading new content. The Facebook outage forced us to take a social media break. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most popular sites would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.2GX71TN Facebook social media apps pictured on an iPhone in Kingston, Ontario on Monday October 4, 2021. Security experts tracking the situation said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.Ĭan platforms have global outages? It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare.WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.Downdetector - which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.As per The Verge, users could load games they already had installed and the browser worked, but social features or installing new games did not. The problem also appears to be affecting Facebook's virtual reality arm, Oculus.Though the error message on the webpage of Facebook Inc suggested a problem with Domain Name System (DNS). The company did not specify the reason for the global outage.

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