Monday’s outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, one of the longest in Facebook’s history, marooned billions of users who rely on the social media giant and its apps for everything from connecting with friends to running their businesses and logging into websites.
The social network and the Facebook-owned platforms stopped working around 11:30 a.m. EDT Monday, according to the site Downdetector.com. At around 5:40 p.m., some users were able to access the platforms, but not all functions were back.
Users going to Facebook's site saw an error page or an onscreen message that said, "Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can."
Instagram and WhatsApp are not showing new or updated content. On Instagram, messages including "Couldn't Refresh Feed" or “5xx Server Error” appeared.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer issued an apology to users on Twitter: "*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now," he tweeted. "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."
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The outage affects Facebook's moneymaker – ads. Facebook's U.S. digital advertising is more than $48 billion annually, according to eMarketer.
Real-time online monitor Downdetector said it has seen more than 5.6 million reports about issues with Facebook and its services Instagram and WhatsApp since 11:15 a.m. EDT Monday. Downdetector said it received more than 123,000 reports of problems for Facebook, 97,000 for Instagram, 34,000 for WhatsApp and 9,600 for Facebook Messenger.
"Most users are reporting troubles with the website and apps overall," Downdetector said in an update. "This outage is still very much ongoing."
About an hour into the outage, Facebook tweeted, "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."
The outage came after a whistleblower said the world's largest social network prioritizes profits over users' safety.
Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen said in an exclusive “60 Minutes” interview Sunday on CBS that a change in 2018 to the content flow in Facebook’s news feed contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer.
Facebook's stock fell by nearly 5% Monday.
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Social media meltdown. What happened?
How did all these networks get affected at the same time? Computer security writer Brian Krebs tweeted a possible answer for some of the problems: Facebook and Instagram were apparently removed from the DNS (Domain Name System) servers that basically make up the white pages of the internet.
"The DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook.com or Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables," Krebs tweeted. "We don't know why this change was made. It could well have been the result of an internal, system wide change or update that went awry. It's all speculation at this point why. FB alone is in control over its DNS records."
Facebook's service became unavailable – and remained unavailable Monday afternoon – and unreachable on the internet, according to web infrastructure company Cloudflare.
This occurred apparently because of an error in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), an internet traffic standard. "From what we understand of the actual issue – it is a globalized BGP configuration issue," Usman Muzaffar, Cloudflare's senior vice president, engineering, told USA TODAY. "In our experience, these usually are mistakes, not attacks."
When traffic is directed at Facebook's internet addresses, the addresses basically are not there because of the issue. "Visitors trying to reach a Facebook property, like facebook.com, will not get an answer and so the page won’t load," Muzaffar said.
"It is 100% an internet routing issue," said Andrew Wertkin, chief strategy officer at BlueCat Networks. "The routes are missing from the internet. Why that happened, we don’t know, nor the cause of it. The routes were withdrawn or yanked. We just don’t why they were yanked."
Is Facebook.com for sale? Twitter reacts
As the incident continued, cybersecurity analyst Anis Haboubi tweeted what appears to be a "For Sale" ad for the Facebook.com domain.
Krebs saw it, too, and found domain name company GoDaddy also offering Facebook.com for sale. "Bidding starts at .... one beeleon dollars!" he tweeted.
Facebook.com was never seriously at risk of being sold, web domain company GoDaddy.com said in a statement to USA TODAY: "A third-party who doesn’t own Facebook.com attempted to list it for sale on Uniregistry.com and we inadvertently included it in search results. Because the third-party didn’t own or control the domain, it was never at risk of being sold and it remains with the current owner. The listing has been removed and is completely unrelated to any platform issues Facebook may be experiencing.”
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On social media, a rumor spread that someone was selling the scraped data of 1.5 billion Facebook users on a hacking forum. Researchers urged caution, saying the information came from a 2-week-old thread and they were unsure that the data was legitimate. One person on the thread alleged they paid for the data but was scammed.
In a statement, Facebook said, "We're investigating this claim and have sent a takedown request to the forum that's advertising the alleged data."
Twitter had reports of issues, but it was operational enough for the site – and CEO Jack Dorsey – to have some fun at Facebook's expense. As social media users came to Twitter, the site tweeted, "hello literally everyone."
And Dorsey replied to the Facebook.com domain sale posting asking "how much?"
Even Instagram had to go to Twitter to tell its users it was aware of, and working on, the problem.
Contributing: Jessica Guynn
