In the event of an unusually large outage, several Facebook Groups services went offline across the board on Monday. Apart from the actual Facebook platform, the WhatsApp chat service and Instagram photos app were also inaccessible to many users, As shown in the error message on websites like downdetector. A Facebook spokesperson apologized via Twitter and assured that the online network is working on the intervention. The causes of the problems were not initially mentioned.
To some web experts it looked like a problem with the DNS service. Among other things, this service ensures that the website names typed in letters are translated into IP addresses so that they can be reached.
According to some experts, the DNS entries of Facebook services disappeared from the service that controlled the data traffic – so to speak, they were invisible to the network infrastructure. John Graham-Cumming, technology owner at cloud service provider Cloudflare, explained that users and software continue to attempt to control Facebook services. This ensures a huge increase in load on other DNS services, he wrote on Twitter.
On the malfunctioning platform, users sometimes reported problems with other online services that were initially largely unconfirmed. From Amazon to large web service provider AWS, which many start-ups and large companies rely on, all offers normally run according to the status page.
Two unnamed IT security experts at Facebook told the “New York Times” that a cyberattack is unlikely as the cause of the problems. Because the technology behind individual apps to group is too different with a cyberattack to bring them all offline at the same time. According to the newspaper, Facebook’s internal communication system also failed.
It’s time for Twitter to exchange information about the failure – and the Facebook competitor was aware of that. “Welcome really all,” tweeted the short messaging service’s account.
For Facebook, which is currently under heightened political pressure in the United States, the several-hour outage was the embarrassing culmination of an already bad week. On Sunday, a former employee identified himself as a whistleblower and accused the online network of putting profit above the well-being of users. He should be questioned in the US Senate on Tuesday. Twitter was accordingly full of jokes about how the disappearance of Facebook made everything better in one fell swoop, including world peace.
DNS malfunctions happen frequently. For example, in July, one of them ensured that several websites were temporarily inaccessible. Triggers Back then there were problems with the web service provider Akamai. The centralization of network infrastructure across large providers ensures that a company failure can tear many services and websites off the network.
In early June, several websites around the world were unavailable for about an hour following a breakdown in the Fastly cloud service. At the time, the British government, the Reddit platform and news portals of the Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the French newspaper Le Monde were affected.
There was a widespread failure at Facebook in the spring of 2019, which, according to the company, was due to an error in the server configuration.
