Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger Outage: 5 Things To Know

ACROSS AMERICA — Facebook said late Monday it had been working to restore access to its services, but fixing the bug that caused outages worldwide for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself. Still, many users continued to report instability, proving fixing the problem wasn't as simple as flipping a switch.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company, told The Associated Press.

The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that felt like a “snow day."

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook's nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food.

It also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure. Facebook's request Monday that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services seemed to ring a bit hollow.

The cause of the outage remains unclear. Madory said it appears Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.

So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as a primary mode of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.

“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said. “They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate.” Tobac said during previous outages, some people have received emails promising to restore their social media account by clicking on a malicious link that can expose their personal data.

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.

Madory said there was no sign that anyone but Facebook was responsible and discounted the possibility that another major internet player, such as a telecom company, might have inadvertently rewritten major routing tables that affect Facebook.

“No one else announced these routes,” said Madory.

Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook’s routing management system could be to blame. Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case. If that failed, it could be in for “a world of hurt” — because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centers, he added.

“What it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by Internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,” Bellovin tweeted.

Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main Twitter account, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform. Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “how much?”

Here are five things to know about the Facebook-related outages:

1. Who's Affected?

More than 98,000 Instagram, 124,000 Facebook and 35,500 WhatsApp users in multiple countries around the globe had been affected by the outage as of shortly after noon Eastern Daylight Time, according to user reports on Downdetector.

It's normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare, The Associated Press reported.

2. When Did The Outage Occur?

It started around 11:45 a.m. ET on Monday and appeared to affect users in many countries around the world.

3. What Is Facebook Doing?

In a tweet addressing the outage, Facebook said, "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 company did not say what had caused the outage.

4. The outages are a big deal for Facebook.

In 2019, Zuckenberg told The Verge that the more frequent outages become, the more likely users are to seek other services.

“Even from just a competition standpoint, what we see is that when we have downtimes in WhatsApp or Instagram Direct, there are people who just don’t come back. They may move their messaging behavior over to iMessage or Telegram or whatever the service is and that’s kind of it.”

In 2019, Facebook strengthened its grip on users in 2019 when Zuckerberg announced he was integrating WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger in 2019. Each remained a stand-alone app, but even as Zuckerberg had vowed a hands-off approach, critics said the move showed how he was trying to exert his authority and also raised antitrust, privacy and security questions, The New York Times reported.

5. Facebook is going through a major crisis.

The whistleblower who was the source of The Wall Street Journal's series of stories exposing the company's awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions went public on “60 Minutes" on Sunday.

Frances Haugen was identified in a “60 Minutes” interview as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls' mental health.

The Journal's stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests instead of the public good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”

Other internet companies reporting outages included Amazon,, Google, AT&T and T-Mobile, but it was unclear at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time if those outages were related.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.