Causation is not correlation, but Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram went down worldwide just hours after a bombshell report about the company’s alleged negligence aired on national television Sunday night. The social media platforms, along with the messaging service WhatsApp, all saw massive failures on Monday that left users frustrated and sent the massive company even further into chaos.
According to reports, this was just more than a DoS attack or a routine error. Something big went wrong, though according to the New York Times some inside the company doubted it was a cyber attack of some kind.
Two Facebook security team members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said it was unlikely that a cyberattack caused the issues. That’s because the technology behind the apps was still different enough that one hack was not likely to affect all of them at once.
In a series of tweets, John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer of Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, said the problem was likely with Facebook’s servers, which were not letting people connect to its sites like Instagram and WhatsApp.
There were a lot of reports of something very strange going on, though.
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) October 4, 2021
https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1445072650720591875?s=19
Apparently, the outage has been so bad employees were struggling to actually get in the building to work.
Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.
— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) October 4, 2021
Source at Facebook: "it's mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too." Tells me employees are communicating amongst each other by text and by Outlook email.
— Philip Crowther (@PhCrowther) October 4, 2021
In a perhaps-unrelated story, Facebook’s stock tanked on Monday.
Facebook stock price is down nearly 15% since nearly a month ago, and down 5% so far today.
— Marty Swant (@martyswant) October 4, 2021
And plenty of people had some fun reacting to the news.
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) October 4, 2021
https://twitter.com/DollyParton/status/1445091714444808202
I just talked to Mark Zuckerberg and he tells me Facebook "is done." Didn't feel like doing it anymore apparently it was eating up a lot of his time.
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) October 4, 2021
who's really behind FB and IG being down pic.twitter.com/441vMvLlW1
— Iris✨ (@Jest_Iris) October 4, 2021
With FB and IG down, check in on your LulaRoe retailer friends
— Lauren Ashley Smith (@msLAS) October 4, 2021
When fb and IG stop working pic.twitter.com/6KyQTliyOj
— Abel girma (@Abelgir23803533) October 4, 2021
everyone relocating to twitter after fb and ig go down#facebookdown pic.twitter.com/Rk5KcexMiq
— psycho bandit🥸 (@djicemike) October 4, 2021
https://twitter.com/arooj_baba/status/1445063958411366402
Hopefully, everyone managed to get through the day as best they can without the algorithm.