Mobile app hangs too (I am from Italy btw)

Was receiving an error page, now just a server not responding error.

Definitely DNS. facebook.com might be in your local dns cache.

I&#x27;m getting an error page with a dead image link and a 2020 copyright date (uk)

No, I&#x27;m getting their error page, so Load Balancers or whatever is behind.
EDIT: Or at least not &#x2F;just&#x2F; DNS.

On the contrary, it&#x27;s said far too much. Facebook is extremely valuable for a lot of people. I dislike Facebook as much as most people on here, but saying &quot;it&#x27;s totally pointless&quot; is silly and it&#x27;s not surprising that those who say it are ignored by those who use Facebook.

Instagram messaging is also very popular, at least around me.

A lot of people, out of habit, rely on high fructose corn syrup for calories.

I certainly do and I dream of the day that everyone I message switches, so I can too.

They relied on AOL Instant Messenger too...

There are plenty of ways to communicate with friends and family. If Facebook is down long enough, many people will just move to something else. (And I hope they do)

Making poor choices seems to be the curse of humankind.

Sure they do. And it&#x27;s why Whatsapp needs to be broken off from Facebook, because they blatantly lied about it and only bought it to kill off their competition

I get that this in jest, but a lot of people rely on Whatsapp and FB Messenger for messaging.

for one example of this look at certain ethnic food catering&#x2F;delivery services that exist in many major cities and operate almost exclusively on facebook.

Many people don&#x27;t realize that with the 2020 lockdown and next to zero face to face transactions happening, platforms like FB Marketplace provided an opportunity for many people to set up businesses and generate income. I understand the angst people have with FB, but there&#x27;s a bigger world out there beyond our keyboards.

A lot of people, many of them home based businesses, also rely on FB Marketplace as a primary source of income.

I can&#x27;t message my friends on whatsapp :(

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced....Finally!

Just because a company has questionable or even straight evil business practices doesn&#x27;t mean that literally millions of companies&#x2F;people don&#x27;t rely on them to do business and communicate.

Facebook bashing is getting old. It&#x27;s 2021, dammit.

Well, I know you jest, but a lot of conversations, with many people, over years and years would be lost. It&#x27;d be akin to hundreds of email threads with friends being deleted.

If Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram fails there are probably a lot of people checking whether their Internet works. That might be why Speedtest was overwhelmed.

Also Speedtest.net for me is showing a 503 error page. Seems a large CDN might be having problems. Their status page shows all green. FB and their other sites are also down.edit: I see it&#x27;s back up and I&#x27;ve been getting downvoted, here&#x27;s a screenshot of the error for clarity<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wvhOwwL.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wvhOwwL.png</a>

Instagram just returns a 503. Crazy how closely everything seems to be integrated.I’d guess internal networking issues, but the insane that something can bring down all of Facebooks properties.

Seems to be affecting all Facebook properties.

<pre><code> dig +trace messenger.com
</code></pre>
shows that all is well with the root DNS servers and<pre><code> dig @a.ns.facebook.com messenger.com
 ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
</code></pre>
and also<pre><code> ping a.ns.facebook.com
 3 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss
</code></pre>
shows that something&#x27;s wrong with facebook.

nslookup www.facebook.com 8.8.8.8
Server: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53* server can&#x27;t find www.facebook.com: SERVFAIL

The down page shows copyright from 2020 smh

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;technology&#x2F;whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;03&#x2F;technology&#x2F;whistle-blower...</a>

Facebook Whistleblower Claims Profit Was Prioritized Over Clamping Down on Hate SpeechA Facebook whistleblower, who is due to testify before Congress on Tuesday, has accused the Big Tech company of repeatedly putting profit before doing “what was good for the public,” including clamping down on hate speech.Frances Haugen, who told CBS’s “60 Minutes” program that she was recruited by Facebook as a product manager on the civic misinformation team in 2019, said she and her attorneys have filed at least eight complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.During her appearance on the television program on Sunday, Haugen revealed that she was the whistleblower who provided the internal documents for a Sept. 14 exposé by The Wall Street Journal that claims Instagram has a “toxic” impact on the self-esteem of young girls.That investigation claimed that the social media giant knows about the issue but “made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public.”“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” said Haugen.She explained that Facebook did so by “picking out” content that “gets engagement or reaction,” even it that content is hateful, divisive, or polarizing, because “it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.”“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she claimed.Haugen is expected to to testify at a Senate hearing on Oct. 5 titled “Protecting Kids Online,” about Facebook’s knowledge regarding the photo sharing app’s allegedly harmful effects on children.During her appearance on the television program, Haugen also accused Facebook of lying to the public about the progress it made to rein in hate speech on the social media platform. She further accused the company of fueling division and violence in the United States and worldwide.“When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she said.She added that Facebook was used to help organize the breach of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, after the company switched off its safety systems following the U.S. presidential elections.While she believed no one at Facebook was “malevolent,” she said the company had misaligned incentives.“Facebook makes more money when you consume more content,” she said. “People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”Shortly after the televised interview, Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch released a statement pushing back against Haugen’s claims.“We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content,” said Pietsch. “To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”Separately, Facebook Vice President of global affairs Nick Clegg told CNN before the interview aired that it was “ludicrous” to assert social media was to blame for the the events that unfolded on Jan. 6.The Epoch Times has reached out to Facebook for additional comment.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theepochtimes.com&#x2F;facebook-whistleblower-claims-profit-was-prioritized-over-clamping-down-on-hate-speech_4030295.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theepochtimes.com&#x2F;facebook-whistleblower-claims-...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-misinformation-public-60-minutes-2021-10-03&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;facebook-whistleblower-frances-...</a>

Whatsapp&#x27;s down too. Tough month for FB, especially with the leak.

&gt; Signal still works<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;thehatedone&#x2F;comments&#x2F;f160jh&#x2F;is_signal_centralized&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;thehatedone&#x2F;comments&#x2F;f160jh&#x2F;is_sign...</a>Signal is still centralized and uses AWS. So if AWS was to go down, it would affect not just Signal but vast swathes of the Internets.

But still a part would be down, if a server has an outage. How about a system, where every device that is used for chatting is a server at the same time? I wonder whether something like that already exists. Bundle it together with bigger servers to handle the load. If the bigger servers experience outages, the service can still continue, although a bit slower

Signal had their own share of downtime. How about going to a federated system instead of repeating the same mistakes? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org</a>)

I would be happy to have an option to share my availability on Matrix with other people that decided the same if that would mean I could bootstrap my network on that platform.As it is now, Matrix may offer better privacy and more robust weil federated and p2p, but if I had to personally ask all of my contacts if they actually use it using some other medium, I can keep using that other medium too for conversations.

The reason contacts don&#x27;t tend to show up on Matrix&#x2F;Element is because we don&#x27;t push the user into sharing their addressbooks given the obvious privacy issues.  Instead you mainly have to figure out who you know out-of-band for now (e.g. tweet &quot;hey, who&#x27;s on Matrix?&quot;).

Facebook down, WhatsApp down, but Signal still works. Time for a change?EDIT: Yes, Signal is not federated, but that&#x27;s what people are at least ready to consider as a WhatsApp alternative. I also created Matrix &#x2F; Element account, and had 0 contacts using it already.

Which seems to indicate a massive infrastructure failure.

In the beginning it responded but gave server errors.

Same issue over at b.ns.facebook.com 
Looping routing creating self-inflicted DDoSmtr -r -c10 -n b.ns.facebook.comStart: 2021-10-04T10:28:03-0600 Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev<pre><code> 1.|-- 192.168.1.1 0.0% 10 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.0 

 2.|-- 96.120.12.229 0.0% 10 10.2 10.8 8.8 15.7 1.9 

 3.|-- 96.110.149.185 0.0% 10 17.7 13.6 9.8 32.3 7.0 

 4.|-- 162.151.51.125 0.0% 10 10.9 12.2 9.6 15.3 1.9 

 5.|-- 24.124.155.233 0.0% 10 13.0 10.4 9.4 13.0 1.2 

 6.|-- 96.216.22.45 0.0% 10 16.5 16.7 11.2 29.1 6.4 

 7.|-- 96.110.43.241 0.0% 10 17.4 13.6 11.9 17.4 1.6 

 8.|-- 96.110.38.114 0.0% 10 12.5 12.8 12.0 14.0 0.6 

 9.|-- 173.167.59.170 0.0% 10 36.1 19.3 11.6 36.1 9.7 

 10.|-- 129.134.40.76 0.0% 10 13.1 12.3 11.3 13.1 0.6 

 11.|-- 129.134.34.72 0.0% 10 15.3 15.7 13.5 21.3 2.5 

 12.|-- 129.134.102.85 0.0% 10 39.0 39.2 38.0 40.8 1.0 

 13.|-- 31.13.25.13 0.0% 10 30.5 29.8 28.5 31.0 0.9 

 14.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

 15.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 

 16.|-- 31.13.25.13 90.0% 10 30.2 30.2 30.2 30.2 0.0
</code></pre>
On a side note... why is it so freaking hard to format line breaks in HN?

Looks like the routing is goofed. Loops over and over - DDoS attacking themselves.mtr -r -c10 -w -b a.ns.facebook.com 
Start: 2021-10-04T10:02:50-0600 
Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev...<pre><code> 4.|-- ae-2-rur101.cosprings.co.denver.comcast.net (162.151.51.125) 0.0% 10 12.6 11.9 9.6 19.0 2.9 

 5.|-- 24.124.155.233 0.0% 10 9.3 10.2 9.1 12.4 1.1 

 6.|-- 96.216.22.45 0.0% 10 12.0 14.0 11.6 31.3 6.1
 7.|-- be-36041-cs04.1601milehigh.co.ibone.comcast.net (96.110.43.253) 20.0% 10 14.6 13.5 11.6 20.5 3.0
 8.|-- be-3402-pe02.910fifteenth.co.ibone.comcast.net (96.110.38.126) 0.0% 10 12.2 12.0 11.5 13.2 0.5
 9.|-- 173.167.59.170 0.0% 10 13.8 17.8 12.0 34.7 8.4
 10.|-- 129.134.40.74 0.0% 10 15.3 12.6 11.4 15.3 1.1
 11.|-- 129.134.43.226 0.0% 10 18.9 15.3 12.6 20.3 3.0
 12.|-- 129.134.98.166 0.0% 10 12.5 14.2 12.5 20.4 2.3
 13.|-- 129.134.54.61 0.0% 10 34.2 30.8 28.9 34.2 1.8
 14.|-- 129.134.53.61 0.0% 10 29.8 31.1 28.9 36.5 2.7
 15.|-- 129.134.53.61 90.0% 10 31.9 31.9 31.9 31.9 0.0</code></pre>

Seems to be DNS related.None of the listed facebook nameservers are resolvable or reachable:a.ns.facebook.com 
b.ns.facebook.com 
c.ns.facebook.com 
d.ns.facebook.com

Facebook went down (error page, then 503) before DNS went down.

&gt; Maybe it&#x27;s DNSIf it is, close Facebook as there&#x27;s probably a BGP hijack going on that is siphoning off personal data and or secrets

One thing that triggers my OCD is leaving the Facebook session open, though it&#x27;s my own computer.Maybe it&#x27;s DNS. It&#x27;s always DNS.

Confirming that we&#x27;re seeing a major outage with all of our integrations with FB products.

It uses the same nameservers as facebook.com, same point of failure.Seems like another poster posted finer details regarding BGP&#x2F;peering which is ultimately causing the issue.

need a status.status.fb.com to indicate the status of the statusand &#x2F; or an S3 bucket with a json blob the apps can pull to at least tell users &#x27;here&#x27;s what&#x27;s up&#x27;

Reminds me of S3 outage a couple of years ago when AWS status page went down because it was relying on... S3...

Duplicates:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748233" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748233</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748199" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748199</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748159" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748159</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748246" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748246</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748131" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28748131</a>

<pre><code> % ping whatsapp.com
 ping: whatsapp.com: Name or service not known
 % ping web.whatsapp.com
 ping: web.whatsapp.com: Name or service not known
 % ping facebook.com
 ping: facebook.com: Name or service not known
 % ping instagram.com
 PING instagram.com (31.13.65.174) 56(84) bytes of data.
 64 bytes from 31.13.65.174 (31.13.65.174): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=110 ms</code></pre>

Looks like the routes to their hosted nameservers are down, e.g. A.NS.FACEBOOK.COM

Which is regrettable when secure alternatives exist like Signal and Matrix whose business model doesn&#x27;t involve selling your data.

For some egregiously loose definitions of &quot;infrastructure,&quot; maybe.

WhatsApp is pretty important infrastructure for most of the world

The servers struggle to reply a basic 5xx answer.Two possibilities:- the DNS services internally have issues (most likely, as this could explain the snowball effect)- it could be also a core storage issue and all their VMs are relying on it and so they don&#x27;t want to block third-party websites and think it will last for a long time, so they prefer to answer nothing for now in the DNS (so it will fail instantly to the client, and drain the application&#x2F;database servers so they can reboot with less load)

Maybe they tried everything else before that.At first it was working but they couldn&#x27;t serve responses: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;UaCtOiX.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;UaCtOiX.png</a>Notice the &quot;2020&quot;

Presumably the DNS being down also wreaks havoc in their internal infrastructure as services can no longer resolve each other&#x27;s names.

agreed, they fell off the internet according to routeviews

It isn&#x27;t just DNS.  If you happen to have cached entries, the site is returning errors as well.

Jep, also from other caches: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nslookup.io&#x2F;dns-records&#x2F;facebook.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nslookup.io&#x2F;dns-records&#x2F;facebook.com</a>

Same here on facebook.com , [api]whatsapp.com (instagram.com works)

No<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.dns-oarc.net&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;dns-operations&#x2F;2021-September&#x2F;021340.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.dns-oarc.net&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;dns-operations&#x2F;2021-Sep...</a>

So far the pattern isn&#x27;t the same. Slack published a DNSSEC record that got cached and then deleted it, which broke clients that tried to validate DNSSEC for slack.com. But in this case, the records are just completely gone. As if &quot;facebook.com&quot;, &quot;instagram.com&quot;, et al just didn&#x27;t exist.

Is this related in any way to what happened to Slack recently in their DNS?

Seeing the same thing with 8.8.8.8 name servers.  Everything I query returns an error

My ISP&#x27;s DNS server went down a few minutes after the Facebook outage, presumably because all the residential customers&#x27; devices keep querying.

I&#x27;m seeing similar DNS errors for many non-Facebook sites.

BGP goof?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;g_bonfiglio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445056923309649926?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;g_bonfiglio&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445056923309649926?s...</a>

Even the Name servers are not returning any values. That&#x27;s bad.dig @8.8.8.8 +short facebook.com NSThese are usually anycasted, meaning that 1 ip return in NS are in fact several servers spread in several regions. They are distributed to closer match through agreements with ISP with the BGP protocol. Very interesting, because it seems that it took 1 DNS entry misconfiguration to withdraw M$ worth of devices from the internet.

It&#x27;s DNS over HTTPS. It relies on the same system as plain DNS, so DoH won&#x27;t really help in this case...

John Graham-Cumming:&gt;Between 15:50 UTC and 15:52 UTC Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates. This is what it looked like to @Cloudflare.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445065270272434176" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445065270272434176</a> (thread)UPD&gt;About five minutes before Facebook&#x27;s DNS stopped working we saw a large number of BGP changes (mostly route withdrawals) for Facebook&#x27;s ASN.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445068309288951820" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445068309288951820</a>

&gt;It&#x27;s always DNSHow is this not the top comment? Underrated

Even Google&#x27;s 8.8.8.8 DNS server says can&#x27;t find, SERVFAIL.

For Facebook and WhatsApp it looks like a DNS issue, name resolution fails with SERVFAIL:<pre><code> $ dig facebook.com

 ; &lt;&lt;&gt;&gt; DiG 9.16.21 &lt;&lt;&gt;&gt; facebook.com
 ;; global options: +cmd
 ;; Got answer:
 ;; -&gt;&gt;HEADER&lt;&lt;- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 23982
 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
 ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
 ;; QUESTION SECTION:
 ;facebook.com. IN A

 ;; Query time: 16 msec
 ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
 ;; WHEN: Mon Oct 04 17:53:00 CEST 2021
 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 41</code></pre>

If they are then Facebook is worse than I thought.

&quot;Move fast and break things&quot;. Yeah, it&#x27;s exactly the opposite. The person should be promoted ;)

What makes you think it was a mistake? What makes you think an engineer did it?Sometimes things just break and take time to fix.

How could anyone answer that question? We don&#x27;t even know that an engineer made a mistake in the first place, much less what the mistake was and what led up to it.

Nope:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;conference&#x2F;lisa19&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;turner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;conference&#x2F;lisa19&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;turner</a>

nope. an individual is never blamed for these sort of issues.

The only person I&#x27;ve ever heard of being fired for an operational error was a principal networking engineer at Amazon who end-ran DNS policies and hand-edited a zone file. Somehow, the file got truncated. It brought down everything including the soft phones so people couldn&#x27;t even spin up a phone-based conference call to deal with it. I think Amazon was down for several hours, with 8 digit losses. That was in the mid 2000&#x27;s. Heard that person was fired but don&#x27;t know for sure.

Thanks everyone for providing the insights, I have no ill-intention, just asking for curiosity sake.

If a single person can cause the failure during the course of their normal tasks, it&#x27;s not the fault of that person it&#x27;s the fault of designers of the systems and processes used by that person.

This question doesn&#x27;t deserve downvotes. While the answer is quite clearly in the negative (this will be a process failure, not a human failure), it looks as though it was asked in good faith, and might not be so obvious to those outside the industry.Vote buttons are not a substitute for proper responses to legitimate enquiry.

&quot;Asking for a friend.&quot;I kid. If it were to come down to a single person, that&#x27;s really a failure of the whole organization system and not of the individual.This apocryphal [1] punchline to the Jack Welch story also sums up how most orgs deal with this sort of thing:&quot;I just spent a million dollars on your education - why would I fire you now?&quot;[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nickmilton.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;jack-welch-on-learning-from-failure.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nickmilton.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;jack-welch-on-learning-fro...</a>

Just wondering - would the engineer who made the mistake be fired?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whatsmydns.net&#x2F;#A&#x2F;facebook.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whatsmydns.net&#x2F;#A&#x2F;facebook.com</a>

Teen depression and suicide rates plummeting right now

b&#x2F;c most humans are on the wrong end of fb&#x27;s covert, exploitative attention-manipulation

Because combined with the abysmal state of education in most places, and a general lack of government action, Facebook is an actual threat to our civilization.

Because he doesn&#x27;t like the website so he thinks nobody else should be able to use it.

One American example quote that holds true for countries outside of America:Direct quote: &quot;That website on Facebook.&quot;There are people who believe that &quot;Facebook&quot; literally equals &quot;Internet&quot;. Facebook, Internet ... Internet, Facebook.Rinse and repeat for your alternative echo chamber regarding Google, the Microsoft Bing, &amp;c.

Weird, because over here WhatsApp is ingrained into the social fabric of your life. Couldn&#x27;t imagine ever going back to texting&#x2F;iMessage.

All of the big tech companies you mentioned could completely disappear overnight and my life would be completely unaffected or possibly improved.

Facebook is an unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising and WhatsApp is basically a utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe. Instagram is a key cultural driver of the Western world. You many not feel any direct firsthand consequences, but the overall impact would transform the world around you.

Maybe Google, because of the search engine. Android: somebody will fill the void.Messaging: people have been switching on hordes to every new free messaging system in the 90s and early 2000s, we will adapt to something else.Netflix and video in general: same thing without the 90s&#x2F;early 2000s.Amazon: very convenient store, we&#x27;ll spend a little less and somebody will fill the void.Apple: can&#x27;t say, never bought anything from them.By the way, when I couldn&#x27;t message on WA today I thought day they finally cut me off because I still didn&#x27;t accept their new privacy policy from months ago :-) I resolved to wait and see for a couple of days.

Facebook is the only one of those that I regularly use. I&#x27;d like something like Google&#x27;s Android to stay around. The rest I don&#x27;t need.

Man, out of those only Netflix going down wouldn&#x27;t cause a gigantic billions of dollars worth clusterfuck to people, businesses and companies. It&#x27;s nice you don&#x27;t use them but about everyone around does and mostly for at least some important things.

With Facebook, whatsapp and Instagram down, it feels like the entire internet is down for me.

I am surprised you have Netflix on the list. It would be annoying for 2 minutes, then you can simply go for a walk or read a book.

disappearance of FB might not impact you, but India runs on WhatsApp.

Of all the big tech companies Facebook is the only one where it can completely disappear overnight and my life would be completely unaffected (or possibly improved by not having to explain to people I don&#x27;t use facebook, please email or text me your invitations rather than use messenger). If Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple disappeared the story would be completely different.

+1, with the recent reveal -<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28741755" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28741755</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28741532" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28741532</a>

Not a fan of FB, but the main reason for WhatsApp&#x27;s success was SMS sucking hairy balls.

No problem, they still have phone numbers of those people so they can send them SMS with Signal invitation. :)

Unfortunately Whatsapp replaced texting for around 80 % of the world.

&gt; &quot;Idk man, this seems like a tough issue. Maybe we should just give up&quot;&gt; &quot;Ok.&quot; - Zuckerburgshuts down $100B company

I hope that you can install other messaging apps as well?

i talk to my parents in India everyday in india. Watsapp is the only game in town there.

The problem for me is Oculus. I really love their headset and I appreciate the investment Facebook has made in that.I hate the stupid strategy tax that makes me have an FB account to use their headset, and has it go down when they have an outage. I hope they can learn from MSFT that &quot;Facebook Everywhere&quot; is ultimately a self defeating strategy.

Who would pay money to be the first user of a new social network?

This would be a golden opportunity to launch your &#x27;Facebook Killer&#x27; app. Preferably a social network where people don&#x27;t pay with their data, but with, you know, a thing called Money.

This is what i came to comments for.Unfortunately, we have literally dozens of comments that amount to nothing more than schadenfreude, and another handful of non-FANG employees speculating how one of the largest internet operations in existence could improve their game (lol)

A BGP routing mistake that can cascade into a hard-to-recover-from state of the network where inter-dependencies lock each other.

I doubt this is the case, but someone on twitter was speculating &quot;what if this is fb&#x27;s infra team going on strike&quot;

What are some of the possible scnarios beyond the DNS issue suggested? (and might it be an attack?)

or it went down by another 20%, everybody at first thinking there&#x27;s something wrong with their internet connection.

downdetector looks like a real mess for it.I&#x27;m going to parrot the other comment here and say nothing of value was lost.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downdetector.com&#x2F;status&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downdetector.com&#x2F;status&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;</a>

Wow. I can’t remember the last time whatsapp was done. I pretty much use messenger&#x2F;instagram&#x2F;whatsapp to talk to most of my friends and family. I’m happy that I do use other platforms otherwise I would be completely cut off from my parents right now.

The whistleblower said she wanted to fix Facebook.Mission accomplished, I&#x27;d say. For now at least.

I don’t think stock dip is related to downtime; anecdotally, I’ve never seen a company’s stock affected by downtime (unless that downtime destroys the business)

Great dip to buy. (I&#x27;m not a facebook zealot, but you know it will recover today or tomorrow once the DNS is sorted in an hour or two)Of course there is the whistle-blower issue too...

Their stock is down 5% too. Everything is down for them today ;)

Anything hosted on Facebook&#x27;s infrastructure is down. The two sites that you note are up aren&#x27;t hosted by Facebook.

According to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lookup.icann.org&#x2F;lookup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lookup.icann.org&#x2F;lookup</a> both glean and reactjs have Cloudflare nameservers. fbinfer has ns.facebook.com nameservers which are presumably down.

Interesting, even some open source sites like: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fbinfer.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fbinfer.com</a> are downbut <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glean.software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glean.software</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reactjs.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reactjs.org</a> aren&#x27;t

Reddit wasn’t working a few min ago. Broader issue?

Amusingly, that returns:&gt; Is Facebook down right now?&gt; Uh oh! Something went wrong on our side. It&#x27;s not you, it&#x27;s us. Feel free to contact us if this persists.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downforeveryoneorjustme.com&#x2F;facebook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downforeveryoneorjustme.com&#x2F;facebook</a>

&#x27;Unusual traffic patterns detected&#x27; now

It&#x27;s amusing that the top 3 trending reports are the FB sites that are down, and then the mobile carriers themselves, presumably because when FB doesn&#x27;t load they assume it&#x27;s their mobile network&#x27;s fault. People really do think FB is the internet

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downdetector.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downdetector.com&#x2F;</a> seems to be working for me at least.

Noticed the same. I started to suspect my mobile plan ran out

Which in turn, reminds of this paper [1] (from someone who previously worked at Facebook).TLDR; Metastable failures occur in open systems with an uncontrolled source of load where a trigger causes the system to enter a bad state that persists even when the trigger is removed.[1] Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sigops.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;conferences&#x2F;hotos&#x2F;2021&#x2F;papers&#x2F;hotos21-s11-bronson.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sigops.org&#x2F;s&#x2F;conferences&#x2F;hotos&#x2F;2021&#x2F;papers&#x2F;hotos21-s...</a>

Their methodology is flawed it seems.It says Google is down but it&#x27;s not. [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downforeveryoneorjustme.com&#x2F;google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downforeveryoneorjustme.com&#x2F;google</a>

I personally like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isup.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isup.me</a> (alias of downforeveryoneorjustme.com) because it&#x27;s much shorter.isup.me&#x2F;facebook gets me what I want.

Seems like it should be isisitdownrightnowdownrightnow.com

Seems like the perfect time to launch isisitdowndownrightnow.com.

Funny enough, I went to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isitdownrightnow.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isitdownrightnow.com&#x2F;</a> to check if Facebook is down, and isitdownrightnow is down itself... probably from the massive number requests coming to check if Facebook is down

Cheers, I&#x27;d edited my post.Thought the common wisdom nowadays was to use nameservers on different TLDs and sub-labels for the best resilience.&#x2F;added, they seem to have glue records so I&#x27;d assume it&#x27;s the nameservers themselves having issues.$ dig NS @g.gtld-servers.net. a.ns.facebook.com;; AUTHORITY SECTION:facebook.com. 172800 IN NS a.ns.facebook.com.facebook.com. 172800 IN NS b.ns.facebook.com.facebook.com. 172800 IN NSc.ns.facebook.com.facebook.com. 172800 IN NS d.ns.facebook.com.;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:a.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN A 129.134.30.12a.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN AAAA 2a03:2880:f0fc:c:face:b00c:0:35b.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN A 129.134.31.12b.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN AAAA 2a03:2880:f0fd:c:face:b00c:0:35c.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN A 185.89.218.12c.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN AAAA 2a03:2880:f1fc:c:face:b00c:0:35d.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN A 185.89.219.12d.ns.facebook.com. 172800 IN AAAA 2a03:2880:f1fd:c:face:b00c:0:35

If you mean because the name servers are in the same zone, this is very common. When an NS is returned for a zone, you also get an “additional” A and AAAA to resolve the NS name. It’s called glue.<pre><code> dig NS example.com
 ; ANSWER
 example.com. NS ns1.example.com.
 ; ADDITIONAL
 ns1.example.com. A 1.2.3.4
</code></pre>
Edit: I didn’t see your glue comment when I wrote this.

Doesn&#x27;t seem too clever that Facebook&#x27;s NS servers are a.ns.facebook.com, b.ns.facebook.com etc. IIRC that kind of setup requires some glue records.

Let’s hope it’s this. Everyone will just shrug and move onto the next hopefully less evil site

I had the exact opposite and it was hilarious. Every time my manager (a great guy and really good at what he did) was away for a week the sprint would go very smoothly.

Used to have a manager that we swore did exactly that. Every time he was away on holiday, mysterious site problems to prove his worth!

Lol exactly what I was thinking. I&#x27;m trying to keep my tinfoil hat in the closet and yet it seems odd that after there is a huge FB whistleblower story on 60 Minutes last night, all of FB goes down today.I really hope it&#x27;s just some internal technical error and not a &quot;see, despite the bad things of FB, you really need us&quot; move.It&#x27;s probably trivial, the timing just seems weird to me.

Facebook is proving that it&#x27;s systemically important by taking the entire site down.....Zuckerberg is taking his ball and going home unless you stop writing mean things about him &#x2F;s

wonder how much of internet traffic as a whole is down now..

If they chose 8:30, then it must have been really risky! ;)

0830 actually :&#x2F;But to be fair... seems like it was a good call to not do it Friday night :D

Someone save a risky release for 9am on a Monday morning? Decided Friday afternoon was too risky?

You broke it.I didn&#x27;t receive expected WhatsApp messages and am only now realizing there&#x27;s no indication within the app that there is even a problem. It only becomes (somewhat) apparent when sending a message never gets a single check mark. Not a graceful failure for the user view.

I unblocked Facebook right now from my hosts file so I could message someone and couldn&#x27;t figure out why Facebook failed to load. I tested HN and viola I see that the entire world has sent Facebook requests to 0.0.0.0  lol

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cyberciti.biz&#x2F;humour&#x2F;a-haiku-about-dns&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cyberciti.biz&#x2F;humour&#x2F;a-haiku-about-dns&#x2F;</a>

Well it sure is the place to find out for sure.

And a lot of people seem to be coming to HN to find out why, judging by how laggy HN is getting right now...

Indeed. People seem to forget that when Facebook goes down, it&#x27;s not just your feed of depressing posts, photos and messages that go away, but also the entire Oculus VR platform, since they demanded a FB account to use Quest headsets.

Expecting to get messages on WhatsApp alternatives tonight ...

I guess the &quot;prophets&quot; at Victory Channel &#x2F; Flashpoint called down Holy Fire on the Facebook infrastructure in retribution ... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;FbSkFuvqFdA?t=1127" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;FbSkFuvqFdA?t=1127</a> . (I&#x27;m an Evangelical Christian but those folks are nuts ... Mario Murillo, Lance Wallnau, Hank Kunneman, Gene Bailey, etc.)

Let this be permanent - not a huge loss for humanity.

Checked isitdownrightnow.com and said Netflix was also down.  Any chance these are related?

Looks like HN is being hit pretty hard right now?

Seems unrelated to their infrastructure, the DNS records for facebook.com, instagram.com, whatsapp.com and all derivative domains are wiped clean it seemsedit: though saying that, they do run their own registrar... Might&#x27;ve fucked something up over there.

WhatsApp and Instagram are both in FB infra. As I understand it, Instagram is fairly integrated with FB services; when I left in 2019, WhatsApp was less so, it was mostly WhatsApp specific containers running with FB&#x27;s container orchestration on FB machines dedicated to WhatsApp (there was and probably is some dependence on FB systems for some parts of the app, for example the server side of multimedia is mostly a FB system with some small tweaks and specific settings, but chat should be relatively isolated). Inbound connection loadbalancing is shared though.FWIW, WhatsApp (on phones) should be resiliant to a DNS only outage, the clients contain fallback IPs to use when DNS doesn&#x27;t work, and internal services don&#x27;t use DNS as far as I remember.At one time, WhatsApp had actually separate infrastructure at SoftLayer (IBM Cloud now), but that hasn&#x27;t been in place for quite some time now. When I left, it was mostly just HAProxy to catch older clients with SoftLayer IPs as their DNS fallback.

I thought Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp ran on different infrastructure (and they&#x27;ve been trying for a while to align everything)?How could they all go down at the same time, if they have different teams of engineers running each product separately?Could anyone with some background (or person familiar with the matter) explain how their system&#x27;s set up?

Not just you. It is very laggy on my end too.

Yep, struggled to load the homepage and this

Plus I don&#x27;t know about you, but I came to HN just now specifically to check if there was any insight into why it was down! The thundering herd just arrived :)

With the Facebook properties down, the rest of the internet will have a significant increase in usage.

Also slow here. I can&#x27;t see anything on the AWS Service Dashboard <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.aws.amazon.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.aws.amazon.com</a>

All running their DNS on AWS. My guess is that AWS is seeing a massive flood of failed and retried DNS requests for facebook properties, similar to what jgrahamc mentions here for Cloudflare: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445066136547217413" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;1445066136547217413</a>

Dropping that many BGP routes will have its high latency toll on the whole internet backbone for minutes&#x2F;hours, I&#x27;m not surprised. I wonder if the recent LE&#x27;s DST Root CA X3 deprecation has something to do with the outage (some DC internal tool&#x2F;API not accessible because its certificate is expired or something like that).

People either have to work, creating load on GitHub, or waste their time elsewhere, creating load on HN and Slack.

I can confirm, HN, GitHub and Slack are very slow for me as well. Google is very fast, on the other hand.

I can confirm, HN, GitHub and Slack are very slow for me as well. Google is very fast, on the other hand.EDIT: actually HN failed to post this comment the first time I posted it!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.speedtest.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.speedtest.net</a> is down too

I&#x27;d guess that automatic processes dominate. Maybe billions of phone apps polling for facebook connectivity (FB messenger is down, for example).

Probably people flooding in to see if anyone knows why things are down. Even Google speed test was down, presumably from too many people testing if it&#x27;s their internet that&#x27;s at issue.

HN lagging, BBC was also very laggy about 30 minutes ago, and 35 minutes ago our whole company got booted out of their various hangouts simultaneously apart from the people in the states.

Same here. Sounds like another cloudflare-like problem.

Probably traffic related. Lots of people reallocated to checking other sites.

Definitely laggy for me as well. Went to Facebook and couldn’t so come here to check in and the load time made me think oh it must be my wifi is not working with 2 sites not opening then finally HN opened. Then tried to hit reply to your post and again seemed like it wouldn’t load then finally did. So yes laggy usually this is the one site that loads almost instantly.

Here too. Just had the &quot;We&#x27;re having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!&quot; error.

Some internet backbone provider is probably down itself.

Internet&#x27;s got a case of the Mondays for sure

Logging out does work! Probably delivering a cache.

A couple of years ago, an admin at Hacker News asked those of us who are just reading to log out because their system is architected in such a way that logged in users use more resources than anonymous ones. So, if you&#x27;re feeling altruistic, log out of HN!

Can confirm.  HN, YT, Google, etc are all a bit laggy for me at the moment (eating lunch so I&#x27;m trying to entertain myself).

Best HN client app ever. Thanks for the great work!

Something&#x27;s wrong with your app. It&#x27;s not working at all, while Harmonic works perfectly.

Yep. I am the developer of HN client HACK for iOS and Android and a bunch of users emailed me asking if my app was broken. Looks like something bigger is afoot.

Wow this really works, thank you. What actually is the reason for it being much faster in a private window? Is there so much tracking going on in a normal window?

That explains why it works fine in my computer, where I haven’t logged in. Thanks for the tip.

This would make for a very good deep-dive technical discussion in an interview setting, I&#x27;m using this.

General tip: If HN is being laggy and you&#x27;re determined you want to waste some time here, open it in a private window. HN works extremely quickly if it doesn&#x27;t know who you are.

Yes, it&#x27;s slow here as well, and posting this comment failed the first time.

Yes, it&#x27;s slow here as well, and posting this comment failed the first and second time.

Yes, it&#x27;s slow here as well, and posting this comment failed the first and second and third time.

Is it just me or HN also feels kinda laggy?

Facebook-owned sites were down