Published , by Donovan Erskine
Published , by Donovan Erskine
Facebook dominated online conversations when its services went out completely earlier this morning. These issues extended to all of Facebook’s services, meaning Instagram and WhatsApp went down as well. Even programs that use Facebook for logins have been experiencing issues as a result. Though not much is known about the source of the outages, it seems to be a DNS issue.
Facebook’s services went down in the morning hours of October 4, 2021, and have remained down for hours. Many flocked to Twitter to discuss the outages, and to speculate on the source of the issue. Upon some light investigation, it seems to be an issue tied to the DNS (Domain Name System). If you try to visit Facebook.com, the error simply states that the website’s “DNS address could not be found.”
Investigative journalist Brian Krebs reported that the DNS records for Facebook and Instagram were withdrawn this morning. It’s this information that has led many to speculate that this was a coordinated attack on Facebook, perhaps orchestrated by somebody affiliated with the company.
Speaking of Facebook employees, other reports state that the issues with the company’s services run so deep, that it’s caused major problems for employees at the company’s physical headquarters. Sheera Frankel of the New York Times shared that she spoke with an employee of the social media company, who stated that workers have been “unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.” NBC News reporter Kevin Collier shared that some employees that are already inside of offices can’t access certain rooms thanks to the outages.
The situation surrounding the Facebook and Instagram outages is still evolving, so we will continue to update this article and report on any new information that comes out.