Wednesday, March 27, 2024
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FACEBOOK WAS Down: INSTAGRAM AND WHATSAPP all had stopped working in a worldwide major outage – now functional

Rob Greaves
Rob Greaves
I have been with the Toorak Times since April 2012. I worked as Senior Editor of the Toorak Times until 2023, when I retired. I now work as a special features contributor for both the Toorak Times and Tagg. I've been in the Australian music scene as a musician since 1964, and have worked in radio and TV and newspapers (when they were actually printed on paper) as well as working in the film industry, as the Film Unit manager on Homicide for several years. I also have extensive experience in audio production and editing.

[Update 9:09am]

The three apps – which are owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure – all had completely stopped working.

As of 9:00am DST, Facebook was back on line again.

The outage had commenced around 2am DST Australia and was worldwide.

Interestingly no one from the company had offered a real explanation although tech experts clam it is a DNS issue (it’s nearly always a DNS issue). DNS servers translate requests for names into IP addresses, controlling which server an end user will reach when they type a domain name into their web browser. 

Reports indicate that Facebook engineers have been sent to the company’s U.S. data centers to try and fix the problem, according to two people familiar with the situation. That means the outage, already Facebook’s most severe in years, could be further prolonged.

Inside Facebook, workers scrambled because their internal systems also stopped functioning. The company’s global security team “was notified of a system outage affecting all Facebook internal systems and tools,” according to an internal memo sent to employees. Those tools included security systems, an internal calendar and scheduling tools, the memo said.

Employees said they had trouble making calls from work-issued cellphones and receiving emails from people outside the company. Facebook’s internal communications platform, Workplace, was also taken out, leaving many unable to do their jobs. Some turned to other platforms to communicate, including LinkedIn and Zoom as well as Discord chat rooms.

Some Facebook employees who had returned to working in the office were also unable to enter buildings and conference rooms because their digital badges stopped working. Security engineers said they were hampered from assessing the outage because they could not get to server areas.

Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at digital security firm Netscout, said Facebook will likely work to gradually restore service, and that it could take some time for routed information “to be received and propagated worldwide.”

In the latest news from facebook, Facebook’s global security operations center determined the outage was “a HIGH risk to the People, MODERATE risk to Assets and a HIGH risk to the Reputation of Facebook,” the company memo said.

A small team of employees weres soon dispatched to Facebook’s Santa Clara, Calif., data center to try a “manual reset” of the company’s servers, according to an internal memo.

Now, you can relax because your interface to world is back!

Rob Greaves

I have been with the Toorak Times since April 2012. I worked as Senior Editor of the Toorak Times until 2023, when I retired. I now work as a special features contributor for both the Toorak Times and Tagg. I've been in the Australian music scene as a musician since 1964, and have worked in radio and TV and newspapers (when they were actually printed on paper) as well as working in the film industry, as the Film Unit manager on Homicide for several years. I also have extensive experience in audio production and editing.

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