{"id":44407,"date":"2021-10-04T17:19:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T23:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/update-facebooks-global-outage-gradually-dissipating\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:19:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:19:24","slug":"update-facebooks-global-outage-gradually-dissipating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/update-facebooks-global-outage-gradually-dissipating\/","title":{"rendered":"Update: Facebook\u2019s global outage gradually dissipating"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FILE
FILE \u2013 In this March 29, 2018, file photo, the logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square. Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol. (AP Photo\/Richard Drew, File)<\/span>Richard Drew<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

The global outage that plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services \u2014 including Facebook\u2019s own workforce \u2014 into chaos Monday is gradually dissipating.<\/p>\n

Facebook said late Monday that it\u2019s been working to restore access to its services and is \u201chappy to report they are coming back online now.\u201d The company apologized and thanked its users for bearing with it. But fixing it wasn\u2019t as simple as flipping a proverbial switch. For some users, WhatsApp was working for a time, then not. For others, Instagram was working but not Facebook, and so on.<\/p>\n

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hourslong global disruptions are rare.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is epic,\u201d said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc., a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world\u2019s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.<\/p>\n

In Southwest Colorado, The Durango Herald<\/em>\u2019s and The Cortez Journal<\/em>\u2019s Facebook pages also were affected. The Herald<\/em><\/a> and Journal<\/em> Twitter<\/a> accounts remained accessible.<\/p>\n

In an unrelated complication, the Herald\u2019s comment feature on its online stories was not functioning Monday.<\/p>\n\n

Facebook\u2019s only public comment so far was a tweet in which it acknowledged that \u201csome people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app\u201d and that it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a \u201csnow day.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook\u2019s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties <\/p>\n

\u2013<\/strong> to run businesses, connect with communities of affinity, log on to multiple other websites and even to order food.<\/p>\n

It also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure. Facebook\u2019s request Monday that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services seemed to ring a bit hollow.<\/p>\n

The cause of the outage remains unclear. Madory said it appears Facebook withdrew \u201cauthoritative DNS routes\u201d that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Such routes are part of the internet\u2019s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.<\/p>\n

So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as a primary mode of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re more susceptible to social engineering because they\u2019re so desperate to communicate.\u201d Tobac said during previous outages, some people have received emails promising to restore their social media account by clicking on a malicious link that can expose their personal data.<\/p>\n

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is \u201can operational issue\u201d caused by human error.<\/p>\n

Madory said there was no sign that anyone but Facebook was responsible and discounted the possibility that another major internet player, such as a telecom company, might have inadvertently rewritten major routing tables that affect Facebook.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one else announced these routes,\u201d Madory said.<\/p>\n

Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook\u2019s routing management system could be to blame. Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case. If that failed, it could be in for \u201ca world of hurt\u201d \u2013 because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centers, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by Internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,\u201d Bellovin tweeted.<\/p>\n

Facebook is going through a major crisis after the whistleblower<\/a> who was the source of The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s series of stories exposing the company\u2019s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions went public<\/a> on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Frances Haugen was identified in a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d interview Sunday as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company\u2019s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls\u2019 mental health.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s stories, called \u201cThe Facebook Files,\u201d painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests instead of the public good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company\u2019s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that \u201csocial media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company\u2019s main Twitter account, posting \u201chello literally everyone\u201d as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform. Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, \u201chow much?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Journal of Cortez, Colorado, contributed to this article.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Service restored Monday evening; Facebook pages in Durango and Cortez affected<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,950,3303,28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-durango","tag-facebook","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86077,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44407\/revisions\/86077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44407"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}