Why were WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook down for over 6 hours?

On October 4, Monday, Facebook's platforms— Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Oculus VR services— experienced a worldwide outage lasting nearly 6 hours. For the majority of the day, users of the social networking platforms received error messages, causing the Silicon Valley firm's stock to fall by nearly 5%.

As users began reporting outages, Facebook issued an apology on Twitter to everyone affected by the disruption of Facebook-powered services."We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible," said Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer of Facebook.

After a few hours, Facebook services began to gradually re-appear. The massive global outage was felt by billions of users across the three platforms, and it proved to be one of the firm's longest outages in its history. Here is everything we know so far. 

What Exactly Happened?

According to reports, the cause of the outage was a 'Domain Name System' (DNS) error on Facebook's main page. Cloudflare senior vice president Dane Knecht stated that the social media giant had encountered a "technical glitch" in its border gateway protocol (BGP) routes. These routes are part of the internet's Domain Name System, which is a critical structure that determines where internet traffic should go. DNS converts a domain name like "facebook.com" to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook's DNS records vanished, apps and web addresses would be unable to find it, according to AP.

Mark Zuckerberg Statement

During the crisis, Facebook and Instagram employees were 'unable to do any work' after the company's internal tools went down and employees were barred from entering the building. Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp were back online for some users after a nearly six-hour outage due to DNS routing issues. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has spoken out about the global outage, stating that the services "are coming back online now." 

Stabilising The Platforms

According to a Facebook statement, a complex DNS issue like the one that hit the company could take several hours for all platforms to work properly on every network. As a result, platforms are being launched slowly and carefully.' According to a Facebook spokesman, it may take longer for all services to stabilise for the world's largest social media platform, which has billions of users worldwide.