Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram are down worldwide
Anyone who tries to log into Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram has been receiving an error message since around 5:30 p.m. Initial user reports suggest a serious failure. The reasons are still unclear.
Whatsapp messages can neither be sent nor received, as is the case on Facebook. Publishers like t3n cannot even publish new news there at the moment. The server API returns an error. Instagram users have problems loading feeds and stories – in short: the Zuckerberg empire is completely down.
The German portal allestören.de is also literally flooded with error messages. For the Whatsapp messenger service alone, the portal received more than 20,000 fault reports in just over half an hour. The Facebook Messenger has completely stopped the service. He reports “no server connection”. In the meantime, even the status page is down, which is supposed to show what problems there are on Facebook.
Whatsapp has now reported on Twitter, but without offering any significant information or perspective.
“Some people” would probably have problems accessing WhatsApp, while there is actually no access to the service – be it via the app or via the web. The most telling error message is currently provided by Instagram. Whoever calls up the website receives a 5xx error after a considerable waiting time. Generally speaking, this describes errors that are caused by the operator’s server infrastructure. So this is not just a misdirected DNS entry, as we were able to find out at Slack a few days ago.
In the meantime, Facebook has also dared to make a similar statement on Twitter. Anyway, the best way to get information from the Zuckerberg empire seems to be on Twitter on Monday night.
5xx errors can affect the server itself, but also upstream gateways or proxies. Facebook has all of it in action. So we only know: The problem lies with Facebook and with some certainty not with a service provider such as a CDN. The recent failure of large parts of the network due to problems at Fastly will not be forgotten in this context.
on Hacker News there is speculation about DNS problems. But that would have to affect the domain name services in the Facebook infrastructure. It goes without saying that they would be down if the servers themselves were also down. Shortly before 7 p.m., more and more details become known, even if there is still no meaningful statement from the Zuckerberg empire itself. It is now clear that all Facebook name servers are not only down, but no longer entered in the name services worldwide. Queries for facebook.com and whatsapp.com do not bring any result, i.e. they do not return the actual IP addresses, just as if the names were not assigned an address at all.
This means that the Zuckerberg services could no longer find each other – this speaks for itself: Oculus can no longer be reached either.
Journalist Dylan Byers claims to have leaked an internal Facebook memo. It reads like this:
A Reddit users wants a source on the technical team to investigate the issues. This source is said to have said the following:
As many of you know, DNS was affected for FB services and this is probably a symptom of the real problem which is BGP peering with Facebook’s peering routers which is very likely due to a configuration change that the came into effect shortly before the outages (from around 1540 UTC).
There are people now trying to get into the peering routers to make corrections, but the people who have physical access are separate from the people who know how to authenticate to the systems and the People who know what to do, so it is now a logistical challenge to bring all of that knowledge together.
This is partly due to the lower staffing levels in the data centers due to the pandemic measures.
And the internet so …
This Whatsapp user certainly meant that well. (Screenshot: t3n)
Of course, the first jokers are not long in coming. This Twitter user is hoping that the hashtag #deletefacebook might have worked:
We are constantly adding new information and findings to the article.
