2021 Facebook outage

Traffic volume for Facebook services on October 4, 2021 with a drop during the global outage

On October 4, 2021, at 15:39 UTC, the social network Facebook and its subsidiaries, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Mapillary, and Oculus, became globally unavailable for a period of six to seven hours.[1][2][3] The outage also prevented anyone trying to use "Log in with Facebook" from accessing third-party sites.[4] It lasted for 7 hours and 11 minutes.

During the outage, many users flocked to Twitter, Discord, Signal, and Telegram, resulting in disruptions on these sites' servers.[9] The outage was caused by the loss of IP routes to the Facebook Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which were all self-hosted at the time.[10][5] Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing was restored for the affected prefixes at about 21:50, and DNS services began to be available again at 22:05 UTC, with application-layer services gradually restored to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp over the following hour, with service generally restored for users by 22:50.[11]

  1. ^ Madory, Doug (October 5, 2021). "Facebook's historic outage, explained". Kentik. Archived from the original on January 4, 2022. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  2. ^ "Locked out and totally down: Facebook is scrambling to fix massive outage". The Verge. October 4, 2021. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference :7 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Barrett, Brian. "Why Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp All Went Down Today". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on October 5, 2021. Retrieved October 5, 2021.
  5. ^ a b Isaac, Mike; Frenkel, Sheera (October 4, 2021). "Facebook and all of its apps go down simultaneously". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  6. ^ "Millions Flock to Signal and Telegram After Facebook Outage". Bloomberg.com. October 5, 2021. Archived from the original on October 16, 2021. Retrieved October 6, 2021.
  7. ^ "Discord down? Current problems and outages". Downdetector. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  8. ^ Dewar, Caitlyn (October 4, 2021). "Is Twitter down?: Users report outage after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram go down". The Herald. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  9. ^ [5][6][7][8]
  10. ^ Madory, Doug (October 4, 2021). "Facebook suffers global outage". Kentik. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  11. ^ Frenkel, Sheera. "Facebook coming back online after lengthy outage". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 4, 2021. Retrieved October 4, 2021.