WASHINGTON – Facebook battled dual crises today as it faced a large-scale outage of its dominant social network for seven hours, and fought against a whistleblower’s damning revelations.
Many long-held fears and criticisms about the platform seem to have been backed up by Facebook’s own research, which ex-worker Frances Haugen has turned over to authorities and the Wall Street Journal.
But as US senators prepared for her highly anticipated testimony today on the documents, Facebook struggled to end an hours-long outage that potentially hit tens of millions of users across its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Tracker Downdetector said it had received 10.6 million reports of problems ranging from the United States and Europe to Colombia and Singapore, with trouble first popping up around 1545 GMT.
Roughly seven hours later, the services began returning online.
“Undoubtedly Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram services will take further time to come online but as of 22:28 UTC Facebook appears to be reconnected to the global Internet and DNS working again,” web security company Cloudflare said in a blog post today.
Facebook has not communicated on the possible cause of the outage, but cyber security experts noted they had found signs that online routes that lead people to the social giant were disrupted.
“Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates,” tweeted John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer at Cloudflare.
During the outage, Mike Schroepfer, the company’s chief technology officer, tweeted his “sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now”.
Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas during the outage were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.” – AFP, October 5, 2021
