Facebook and the network of social media companies it owns — including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR — suddenly went offline for seven hours before coming back alive on Monday evening.
The reason for the shutdown was not clear, but online tools that track Facebook suggest it’s a problem with its Domain Name System, or the servers that help create a website’s IP addresses.
Facebook’s internal communications platform, Workplace, was also not working, and most of its employees were unable to do their jobs and have been forced to take a “snow day,” according to one report.
Facebook has dispatched a small team of employees to its Santa Clara data center in California to try to reset the company’s servers manually, according to the New York Times.
Internet security experts suggest the shutdown was triggered by an internal error that left Facebook’s servers unable to send users to the right destination.
Facebook faced similar widespread shutdown problems with all of its websites and apps earlier in March and July. In 2019, it suffered a shutdown that lasted 24 hours before Facebook said it was resolved.
After that long shutdown in 2019, the tech giant only vaguely alluded to the problem as “a result of a server configuration change.”
Part of the reason for all of the apps going down at the same time is likely attempts by Facebook over the past few years to integrate the technical ecosystem hosting all its platforms.
The outage was likely to be an internal error and not due to a cyberattack because the technology behind each of the apps is unique enough that a single hack could not affect all of the platforms at one time, two Facebook security team members told the New York Times.
Facebook acknowledged the problem and said it was working on it.
“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,” Facebook communications executive Andy Stone tweeted.
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Internet security experts say that even after Facebook gets its network back up, a long period of instability is expected to occur because of issues with rebooting its large and expansive system.
