Status: 04.10.2021 7:32 p.m.
The network services WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are affected by a massive disruption. Tens of thousands of users reported failures. The reasons are still unclear. Facebook announced that it is working to fix the problem.
In the event of an unusually large outage, several Facebook group services went offline. In addition to the actual Facebook platform, the WhatsApp chat service and the Instagram photo app are also inaccessible for many users.
On the website for fault reports downdetector.com more than 50,000 incidents were reported in connection with the popular apps of the Facebook group.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone apologized via Twitter and assured that the online network was working on the interference. “We understand that some people are having problems with WhatsApp right now.” They are working on a solution and will give an update as soon as possible.
DNS could be the problem
The causes of the problems have not yet been named. An error message on the Facebook website mentioned a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS). Among other things, this service ensures that website names typed in letters are translated into IP addresses so that they can be accessed.
The technology boss of the cloud service provider Cloudflare, John Graham-Cumming, pointed out that users and software continue to try to control Facebook services. That ensures a massive increase in the load on other DNS services, he wrote on Twitter.
Not for the first time
DNS malfunctions happen again and again. In July, for example, one of them ensured that numerous websites were temporarily inaccessible. The trigger at the time were problems with the web service provider Akamai. The centralization of the network infrastructure at large providers ensures that the failure of a company can tear as many services and websites off the network.
At the beginning of June, numerous websites around the world were already unavailable for around an hour after a malfunction in the Fastly cloud service. At that time, the British government, the Reddit platform and the news portals of the Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the French newspaper Le Monde were all affected.