Six-Hour Outage Hits Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp: What We Know About the Massive Social Media Breakdown

Zuckerberg apologized.

On October 4, users complained of problems accessing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Journalists and technical specialists suggested that this was caused by changes in the domain name system: the internet effectively “stopped seeing” Facebook and related sites.

Other services slowed down due to the influx of users from this social network. Here is what we know about the six-hour outage of social media services.

Facebook and the company’s apps “go down”

At 6:45 p.m. Kyiv time, users began reporting problems accessing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, both through mobile apps and web versions. WhatsApp users said they could not send messages.

Facebook representatives said they were aware of problems accessing the apps and were working to fix the issues.

New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel said Facebook employees were physically unable to enter the office to assess the scale of the problem, because their electronic badges were not working.

Instagram representatives confirmed the outage and promised to restore everything shortly. Users were asked to “bear with us for a little while.”

Journalists and media later reported that not only Facebook’s apps and services had stopped working, but also its internal tools and communication platforms, including Workplace.

After the outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Twitter began experiencing problems due to the influx of users. It was difficult to log in to the social network, and replies to posts and quote tweets did not always load. Users then began complaining about outages at Google, Amazon and TikTok.

Possible cause of the outage

Journalist Brian Krebs said that DNS records telling systems how to find Facebook or Instagram were deleted on the morning of October 4 from global routing tables.

He noted that he did not know why the DNS records were deleted. Krebs believes this probably happened due to an internal system update at Facebook. Other journalists and technical specialists confirmed the deletion of the records.

It is worth noting that Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth fell by $6.6 billion amid the news of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage, due to a drop in shares. He slipped to sixth place on the Forbes billionaires list.

Reactions to the outage

Twitter joked and welcomed “literally everyone” amid the sudden influx of users from other services during the global outage.

Reddit took advantage of the situation to remind users of its existence.

Twitter users joked about the situation with Facebook’s outage and celebrated the “triumph” of their favorite social network, which continued to work.

Restoration of service and apologies

After an outage of almost six hours, the Facebook and Instagram social networks, as well as the WhatsApp messenger, were restored. At around 1:30 a.m. Kyiv time on October 5, Facebook reported that services were gradually resuming.

The company said the outage was caused by configuration changes to backbone routers that coordinate traffic between the company’s data centers.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized to users for the outage: “I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people who matter to you.” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer also apologized.

The October 4, 2021 outage was one of the most serious in Facebook’s history. The last comparable incident occurred in 2019, when the social network was completely unavailable for about an hour and experienced disruptions throughout the day.