Update 4 (10/04/2021 @ 06:56 PM ET): WhatsApp is finally back online as well. Click here for more information. The article, as published earlier today, is preserved below.
Facebook services across America, Europe, and Asia are being disrupted this morning, causing users of Facebook itself, Facebook Messenger, and its sister services Instagram and WhatsApp to throw up error messages when attempting to access any of the sites and services on any OS. The issue could be related to DNS, as none of the domains are returning an IP. The outage is also affecting services that offer a Facebook login, such as Pokemon Go.
Facebook has not yet publicly commented on the ongoing outages affecting all of its services. Even the Facebook Workplace Service Status is inaccessible at this moment. We’ll be sure to update this story as we learn more.
Down Detector shows a massive spike in reports from around 1130 EST today, across all four services.
At the time of writing, there has been no other acknowledgment from Facebook that the problem exists on any of its social media pages and as such, we've got no information on the cause of expected duration.
We'll keep an eye on this Facebook outage and update you when we have some further information.
Update 1: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram acknowledge downtime, new info on why
The official Twitter accounts of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have acknowledged that their services have gone dark. The reason all of these services are down, according to journalist Brian Krebs, is because the DNS records that tell systems how to navigate to them has been withdrawn from global routing tables. Why this happened is still unknown, as Facebook should be in control over its own DNS records.
Update 2: Facebook shows signs of life
Parts of Facebook are slowly coming back online. The company's Newsroom is back up, and we're able to see the XDA Facebook page. However, things are very slow at the moment, and other services like Instagram and WhatsApp still seem to be down. We'll continue monitoring the situation and will update this post as soon as the services are back online.
Update 3: Instagram and Messenger are back online
After several hours, Facebook has brought back more of its core services. The main website appears to be functioning for many people, and Instagram and Messenger also appear to be back online. WhatsApp, however, appears to still have issues, though we've seen it intermittently come back for some users.
For those wondering what happened, this blog post from Cloudflare does a great job at explaining how Facebook basically disappeared off the face of the Internet. To find out exactly what led to this situation, we'll have to wait for the company's own internal investigation into the issue. However, cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reports that the issue stemmed from "a routine BGP update gone wrong", as the update "blocked remote users from reverting changes" and people with physical access "didn't have network/logical access" to revert it.
Update 4: WhatsApp is back online
Multiple users around the world are reporting that WhatsApp is back online, and messages are finally going through. We can confirm the service is back for some XDA Portal staff, but the company has yet to announce that its services are fully functional. It may take a few minutes for the service to be restored in your area, so keep checking!