Facebook is back online after a massive global outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and its Oculus gaming platform. The sites went down just before noon on Monday. The social media giant blamed it on ‘networking issues.’
This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours, according to technology publication The Verge.
The Associated Press reports that there was no evidence as of Monday afternoon that malicious activity was involved. Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.”
The outage came the same day Facebook asked a federal judge to dismiss a revised Federal Trade Commission antitrust complaint against it because it faces vigorous competition from other services. It also comes on the heels of a whistleblower report from a former Facebook product manager who claims the company encourages harmful practices for profit. Frances Haugen went public on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.
While the cause of Monday’s outage remains unclear, the director of internet analysis for Kentik, Inc, Doug Madory, says it appears Facebook deleted basic data that tells the rest of the internet how to communicate with its properties. Such data is part of the Domain Name System, a central component that directs internet traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its location on the public internet, apps and web addresses simply could not locate it.
