Facebook suffered its worst outage since 2008 on Monday for more than six hours. Along with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were also not accessible for six hours on Monday. Now, these apps are accessible after this worst outage since 2008.
Facebook said in a statement, “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Facebook did not reveal what went wrong. According to reports by the media, the outages were widespread, but it was not clear how many users faced issues in accessing apps.
ThousandEyes said in an email statement that the outage was due to DNS failure. DNS is somewhat like a phone book for websites. When in 2008, Facebook faced this issue that time, it had only 80 million users. Today this platform has almost 3 billion users.
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, apologized in a statement posted to Twitter, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues, and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
In 2019, a similar kind of outage lasted for an hour. For that outage, Facebook blamed a server configuration change.
