Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp & Messenger Down

Facebook and its Services Experience Global Outage

A widespread disruption is currently affecting global access to Facebook, extending to all social networks under its ownership. This includes popular platforms such as Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Attempts to access these websites are met with server errors. Specifically, Instagram displays a “5xx server error,” signaling a problem originating from Facebook’s server infrastructure.

Users are reporting an inability to send messages or refresh content within the mobile applications for these services.

Impact Beyond Core Social Networks

The outage isn't limited to Facebook's primary social media offerings. Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality system, and Workplace, the company’s business-focused communication platform, are also experiencing downtime.

Root Cause: DNS Failure

Investigations suggest the issue stems from a failure within the DNS (domain name server) system. This critical component of the internet’s infrastructure translates domain names into server addresses.

Consequently, requests to access facebook.com are currently unable to be routed to the correct server location.

Financial and Scrutiny Context

The disruption lasted approximately six hours for the trillion-dollar company, which serves 2.9 billion monthly active users. During this period, Facebook’s stock value decreased by around 5.5%.

This decline occurs amidst a pre-existing downward trend for the stock, fueled by increased scrutiny from the U.S. Senate.

This scrutiny follows the release of internal documents, leaked to The Wall Street Journal by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Service Restoration and Facebook’s Statement

Access to Facebook and its associated applications, including Instagram and WhatsApp, began to be restored for many users shortly before 6:00 PM ET.

Later Monday evening, Facebook’s engineering team released a statement regarding the incident.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations,” the company announced.

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

Updated 10/5/21, 9:00 AM EST with information from Facebook’s official update.