Facebook’s whole network of services fell offline just as Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the business over a whistleblower’s claims and its management of research evidence showing Instagram is detrimental to adolescents.
The disruption began shortly before noon ET and lasted nearly six hours to fix. This is Facebook’s biggest outage since a 2019 incident knocked the site offline for more than 24 hours, wreaking havoc for small companies and creators who rely on these services for a living.
On Monday evening, Facebook provided an explanation for the outage, stating that it was caused by a setup error. The business claims that no user information was harmed.
At 5:30 p.m. ET, after failing all tests for the most of the day, a DNSchecker.org test of ISP DNS servers revealed that the majority of them had successfully found a route to Facebook.com. We were able to resume regular use of Facebook and Instagram a few minutes later; however, the DNS repairs may take some time to reach everyone.
“We’re aware that some users are having difficulties accessing our applications and products,” Facebook communications exec Andy Stone writes on Twitter. We’re working hard to restore normalcy as soon as possible, and we regret for any inconvenience.”
“We are having networking difficulties and teams are working as quickly as possible to fix and restore as quickly as possible,” Mike Schroepfer, who will step down as CTO next year, tweeted.
Nearly all of Facebook’s internal communication and work processes have been disrupted as a result of the outage. Several employees told The Verge that they communicated using their company’s Outlook email accounts, despite the fact that employees can’t receive emails from outside addresses.
Employees who were signed into work products like Google Docs and Zoom before to the outage can continue to use them, but anyone who needs to log in with their work email has been barred.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, Facebook engineers have been dispatched to the company’s US data centers to try to resolve the issue. That means the outage, which was already the worst in years, might go even longer.
