WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram down LIVE Updates: Mark Zuckerberg speaks as services return

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has broken silence about all his three platforms— Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram's lasting global outage as he said on October 5 that the services "are coming back online now". Furthermore, the CEO added, "Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."

Facebook on October 5 said in a tweet that its services were now coming back online as the team worked to fix the issue. "We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us," the social media giant stated after a global outage of nearly 6 hours. 

After almost a six-hour outage due to DNS routing problems, Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp were back online for some users. Facebook platforms experienced a lengthy outage that disrupted the Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Oculus VR services late on Monday night. The apps are now finally back online after being down for more than five hours. Although, the company stated on October 5 that a complex DNS issue such as the one that hit the firm could take up to several hours for all the platforms to work properly on every network. A Facebook spokesman told the local US outlet that it may take longer for all the services to stabilize for world’s largest social media with billions of users globally. 

Facebook’s chief technology officer (CTO) tweeted that the team is working “as fast as possible”  to restore the services amid the global blackout for all of Facebook’s platforms. “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now,” Mike Schroepfer said. Furthermore, Facebook’s CTO informed that the company was experiencing networking issues and the teams were trying to debug it as quickly as possible. 

Facebook and Instagram employees are 'unable to do any work' as the social media giant's internal tools at the workplace have suffered a massive outage, as well, reports on October 5 have confirmed. Facebook encountered a glitch across all of its platforms— Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and Facebook Messenger causing the online services to halt for its users worldwide late Monday night.

The websites and the messaging app returned an error at around 11:45 am ET, unable to load for the users. now, reports have emerged, stating that the employees at Facebook have been struggling to access office systems, while many others could not even enter the building or access their work premises. Facebook employees are communicating via text message and Outlook email, Associated Press reported, adding that the situation was pretty chaotic at the three buildings. 

CEO of Instagram has said on October 5 that it feels like a 'snow day' for staff, as there's a worldwide outage of all the three major Facebook platforms and employees are having a "bit of a tumbleweed moment." 

"It's mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too," Philip Crowther, a reporter for the Associated Press, reported on Twitter.

Facebook employees have been locked out of the offices as their turnstile badges did not work following the mass outage of service worldwide. Insider confirmed that the employees were shut out of the conference rooms as they were denied access early on Tuesday, meanwhile NBC learnt that the situation was "really bad" and the communication and internal tools were apparently inaccessible. 

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Tuesday took to its official Twitter handle to use Facebook’s global outage scenario to propagate the COVID-19 mask advisory to the citizens, worldwide. The health agency shared an informative video, tweeting: Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are down, but “never let your mask down.” It further went on to add, “wear a mask properly”.

The global health agency advised the world’s citizens to wear a mask or a protective covering to avoid contracting the novel COVID-19 disease. “A properly fitted mask reduces your risk of COVID-19,” WHO said. It warned, that If a mask is below the nose or mouth or has gaps on the sides, chances are that the virus might get in. WHO also advised the citizens to keep practicing the physical distancing, to wash hands from time to time, and use the elbow to cough and sneeze to stop the spread.

With Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Messenger hit by more than 3 hours of lasting outages on Monday night and no restoration of services in sight up until midnight, October 5, netizens took to Twitter to share their woes and bombard the platform with a slew of hilarious memes. Pouring light humour about the major outages that involved the global shutdown of the most widely used websites Instagram, Facebook, and the messaging service Whatsapp, netizens dropped memes depicting the Facebook team "fixing" the internet problems.

Others hashtagged the global disruption as #dramaalert. "Looks like it’s a DNS problem," one wrote sharing the meme portraying the watch appearing to wait for the services' restoration. Others joked, that they could "now go to the Facebook HQ LIVE" to get the latest update as the outage on all three platforms had cut the communication. Meanwhile, several others joked about the fact that Facebook employees "were unable to enter buildings to begin assessing the extent of the outage because their badges were not working."  Some poured memes about Twitter that had all three platforms—Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram onboard to convey LIVE updates to the users. 

As the social media giant Facebook and its shared platforms WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger encountered an outage worldwide, the Facebook site on October 4 suggested a 'Domain Name System' (DNS) error on its main page. Facebook Inc's social media site wasn't accessible for hundreds of thousands of users globally due to service disruptions suddenly, which was later confirmed by an outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

An error message on the website read: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can." More than 50,000 incidences of outages were reported by Facebook users, globally, as per the Downdetector.com. Nearly 850,000 tweets about the WhatsApp service hindrance were reported on Twitter, as the messaging app started trending on Twitter In late on Monday. 

[Credit: Downdetector.com]

[Credit: Downdetector.com]

Late Monday night, the social media platforms WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook as well as Messenger was hit with a suspected global outage as the firm’s entire network of services were disrupted, and abruptly went offline. The issue with Facebook was experienced worldwide. Cloudflare senior vice president Dane Knecht was quoted as saying that the social media giant had encountered a technical glitch in its border gateway protocol routes known as the BGP that routes the path to deliver internet traffic.

Facebook took to its official Twitter handle to inform that it was aware of the global outage and was working to get the services up and running as quickly as possible. While Facebook could not load for the users worldwide, Instagram on October 4 flashed the 5xx Server Error message. The outage also hit the virtual reality arm, Oculus. 

The disruption in the Facebook website, as well as WhatsApp, was first noted at around 9 PM, India time, as the page for the social media site could not load for users globally. Users poured in the complaints about the outage on micro-blogging site Twitter and tagged Facebook.