Why were Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp down today? Everything we know so far

In an unprecedented disruption lasting nearly 6 hours, Facebook’s platforms-- Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Oculus VR services faced a worldwide outage on October 4, Monday. Users of the social networking platforms received error messages for the most part of the day which in turn, pulled down the stocks of the Silicon Valley firm by nearly 5%.

As users began reporting an outage, Facebook issued a statement on Twitter apologising to everyone who had been impacted by the disruption of Facebook powered services. "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible," said Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer of Facebook.

Hours later, Facebook services began to gradually come back online. The mass global outage was experienced by billions of users of the three platforms, and turned out to be one of the longest outages in the history of the firm. Here is everything we know so far.

Why was Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp down today?

What happened:

According to reports, the Facebook site suggested a 'Domain Name System' (DNS) error on its main page as the cause of the disruption. Cloudflare senior vice president Dane Knecht stated that the social media giant had encountered a 'technical glitch' in its border gateway protocol routes, also known as the 'BGP'. Such routes are part of the internet's Domain Name System, a key structure that determines where internet traffic needs to go. DNS translates an address like "facebook.com" to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook's DNS records disappeared, apps and web addresses would be unable to locate it, AP decoded. 

Mark Zuckerberg breaks silence

In the crisis, Facebook and Instagram staff were 'unable to do any work' after the company’s internal tools also suffered a massive outage and employees were shut outside of the building. After almost a six-hour outage due to DNS routing problems, Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp were back online for some users. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has broken silence about the global outage saying that that the services "are coming back online now".

Work ongoing to stabilise the platforms

According to a statement by Facebook, 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. Which is why platforms are being brought online 'slowly and carefully.' A Facebook spokesman told a local US outlet that it may take longer for all the services to stabilize for the world’s largest social media with billions of users globally.