Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp are back after a global failure

Facebook probably got a massive breakdown under control after around six hours. The services have been available again since midnight. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp apparently stable.

The nightmare for Facebook lasted at least six hours. For so long, all services of the Facebook group were not available worldwide. Not only the major platforms such as Whatsapp, Instagram or Facebook themselves were affected by the failure, but also all other applications such as Oculus VR or Workplace. The attempt to access one of the pages resulted in an error message.

Apparently this also applied to the internal tools at Facebook. According to media reports from the USA, it was a failure that affected “all Facebook internal systems and tools”, including security systems, calendar and scheduling tools. The employees stated that they had problems calling from their work cell phones and receiving emails from outside Facebook.

Shortly before midnight German time, more and more users reported that the services of the world’s largest online network were working again for them. In the course of the next few hours, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp were stable again.

There was initially no official statement from Facebook about the reasons for the massive failure. Technology boss Mike Schroepfer initially only spoke of “network problems”. Mark Zuckerberg apologized in a short Facebook post.

Apparently it was a configuration error in the network infrastructure that made the Facebook services inaccessible. According to some experts, the DNS entries of the Facebook services disappeared from the service that controls the data traffic – so they were, so to speak, invisible to the network infrastructure. In other words, Facebook removed the card thanks to which computers around the world can find the company’s services, wrote IT security expert Brian Krebs. “If someone types the address Facebook.com into their web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com and displays an error message.”

The technology boss of the cloud service provider Cloudflare, John Graham-Cumming, pointed out that users and software continue to try to control Facebook services. That ensures a massive increase in the load on other DNS services, he wrote on Twitter.

Two unnamed IT security experts from Facebook told the New York Times that a cyber attack as the cause of the problems appeared unlikely. Because the technology behind the individual apps of the group is too different to bring them all offline at the same time with a cyber attack.

The malfunction was so difficult to get under control that, according to the New York Times, Facebook had to send a team to its data center in Santa Clara, California to attempt a “manual reset” of the servers.

For Facebook, which is currently under increasing political pressure in the USA, the failure of several hours was the negative climax of an already unpleasant week. It was only on Sunday that a former employee identified herself as a whistleblower and accused the online network of putting profit above the well-being of the user. She should be questioned in the US Senate on Tuesday.

The Facebook share closed with a minus of almost five percent. Even after that, the company was still worth around $ 920 billion on the stock exchange. After the disruption was resolved, the price in after-hours trading temporarily increased by 0.55 percent.

(with material from dpa)