‘We’re sorry’ says Facebook after ‘epic’ worldwide outage

Facebook, along with its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, suffered a worldwide outage Monday that had the mammoth social network apologizing around 6:30 p.m. as service began to return.

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. and crawled back to life 7 hours later.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour.

Facebook tweeted at about 6:30 p.m.: “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.”

The outage also showed that, despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can truly replace the social network that has evolved in 17 years into all but critical infrastructure.

Separately, Facebook on Monday requested that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services.

The cause of the outage remained unclear Monday. Madory said it appears Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties.

Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it.

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3iyNF4T