New York (CNN Business). Service started to come back online around six hours after Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook went down. However, coverage was still limited.
According to the public statements of the three Facebook services, Facebook (FB), Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced outages Monday midday.
Down Detector, an outage monitoring site, logged tens to thousands of reports on each service. Facebook’s site wouldn’t load; Instagram and WhatsApp weren’t accessible but could not load new content.
The company was facing increasing difficulties when the outage occurred.
On Sept. 30, Senator Richard Blumenthal asked Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head for safety, questions about Facebook-owned Instagram. He specifically focused on the potential negative effects on children and young girls.
Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” featured Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, claiming that the company knows how its platforms are used for hate, violence, and misinformation and that Facebook has attempted to conceal that evidence. Facebook has denied those claims.
After weeks of criticism and reporting on Facebook, Haugen had released thousands of pages worth of internal documents to Wall Street Journal regulators. On Tuesday, Haugen will testify before Senate Subcommittee Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.
Haugen, in her prepared testimony, which CNN obtained on Monday prior to her appearance before the subcommittee said that she came forward “because I recognized a frightening fact: almost nobody outside of Facebook knows what happens within Facebook.”
Facebook did not comment on Monday.
Many users were shocked to learn that WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook all had significant problems for six hours.
Doug Madory (director of internet analysis at Kentik) said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an outage such as this before from any major internet company.”
Madory said that Facebook is the internet for many people.
Madory stated that firms sometimes lose internet connectivity after they upgrade their network configurations. Fastly, a US cloud computing company, experienced an internet outage lasting approximately 50 minutes in June.
However, the fact that a company with the resources and size of Facebook was offline for six hours indicates that there was no quick solution.
Just after 6:30 PM ET, Facebook posted that its apps were starting to work again.
It said, “To the vast community of people and companies around the globe who depend on us: We’re sorry.” “We have been hard at work to restore access to our services and apps, and we are pleased to announce that they are now back online. We appreciate your patience.
Later Monday, Santosh Janardhan (Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure) released a statement expressing regret for the disruption caused by the outage on all our platforms.
“Our engineering teams discovered that configuration changes made to the backbone routers, which coordinate network traffic between our data centres, caused problems that disrupted this communication. Janardhan stated that this disruption in network traffic caused a cascading effect to the way data centers communicate, which brought our services to an abrupt halt.
Janardhan stated that there is no evidence that user data was compromised by the downtime.
Multiple security experts pointed out that the DNS problem was a potential culprit earlier. Thousand Eyes, Cisco’s internet analysis unit, stated on Twitter at 1 PM ET that it had found evidence of a DNS problem. DNS converts website names into IP addresses that can easily be read by computers. It is often called “the phonebook of the internet”.
Four hours later, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted that the outage had been over: “We are experiencing network issues and our teams are working as quickly as possible to debug these and restore as soon as possible.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page as services started to come back online.
He wrote, “Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger are back online now.” “Sorry about the disruption today, I understand how important it is to keep connected with those you love.”
