Posted by ExomatrixTV
(here)
Facebook-owned properties — including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — were hit by sweeping outages Monday.
The issues started around 11:45 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector, and were hitting users globally.
By 12:30 p.m. ET, the outages appeared to subside, according to DownDetector, though tens of thousands of users were still reporting problems.
Shortly after noon, Facebook’s site returned a message that read, “This site can’t be reached.”
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman,
acknowledged the outage on Twitter, saying, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Twitter users responded by mocking the company,
saying that “the world would be better if you just left it all switched off” and
that “we’re actually enjoying the lack of disinformation and misinformation.”
Facebook
reportedly said in an internal memo to employees that it appeared “to be a DNS issue that is impacting both internal and external access to our tools and apps,” according to Dylan Byers, a senior correspondent for Puck News.
A DNS, or Domain Name System, connects domain names to the right IP addresses so that people can access popular websites. Earlier this year, an outage at a major DNS operator
took out huge swaths of the internet briefly.
Major websites can also go offline if content delivery networks, or CDNs, crash, which is what happened in June, when a Fastly
crash took out major websites including Amazon, Google and The New York Times.
This time around, other sites might be impacted, but the Facebook-owned sites appear to be bearing the brunt of the issues, according to DownDetector.
Cell phone carriers T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T also reported some major outages — though far less sweeping — around the same time as Facebook, according to DownDetector.
“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!” Instagram
tweeted.
The issues started around 11:45 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector, and were hitting users globally.
“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!” WhatsApp
added.
Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality gaming platform, was having issues, too.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Oculus
tweeted.
Twitter users quickly made “#instagramdown” and “#facebookdown” trending on the platform in response to the outages.
Shares of Facebook were down more than 5 percent on what was already a tough day for the Big Tech stock.
Social media users took to Twitter to complain about the outages and how they tried to restart their internet connection when they could no longer access the Facebook-owned platforms.
“Me after I restarted my internet router for 5 times and then finding out WhatsApp and co servers are down,” user @_farhankarim
wrote, along with an image of a clown.
User @SazMCFC
joked that Twitter is “saving the world as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook crash,” along with an image from the Netflix hit series “Squid Game.”
User @Rocky_Ankomah7
tweeted an image of a repair technician grappling with wires and captioned it, “Mark Zuckerberg trying to fix WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.”
The outage comes a day after a Facebook whistleblower who leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal
came forward and identified herself as Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook.
Haugen, 37, said she came forward after seeing Facebook consistently choosing “to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
She also linked what she characterized as Facebook’s inaction in squashing misinformation and the Jan. 6 US Capitol riot, suggesting that Facebook is at least partially responsible for the fatal event.
“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction,” said Haugen.
“But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” said Haugen.
“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” the woman charged.
Haugen is set to testify before Congress this week. She has already filed reams of anonymous complaints against the company with federal authorities.
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