new York Facebook seems to get its major failure under control after around six hours. Shortly before midnight German time, more and more users reported that the services of the world’s largest online network were working again for them.
With Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, some of the largest Internet services in the world went down on Monday afternoon. Both in the USA and in Germany, the services, which all belong to the Facebook group, were not available. Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality platform, didn’t work either.
“We know that some people currently have problems using our apps and products”, wrote Facebook spokesman Andy Stone on Twitter. “We’re working on it, Getting everything back to normal as quickly as possible. ”This is made more difficult by the fact that Facebook’s internal communication platform, Workplace, is currently not working either.
According to the “New York Times”, Facebook took unusual measures to fix the hours of downtime in its services. The online network sent a small team of employees to its data center in Santa Clara, California to attempt a “manual reset” of the servers, the newspaper wrote, citing an internal circular.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
On Facebook itself, digital door locks and other networked technology have failed in addition to the internal communication platform, it said. Employees were temporarily unable to enter the headquarters in Menlo Park, California. During the pandemic, most Facebook employees work from home anyway. However, central technical functions in particular will continue to be controlled by the company campus.
Even more than five hours after the outage began, Facebook did not provide any information on the causes. “We have network problems” and the teams worked as quickly as possible to fix them, wrote technology boss Mike Schroepfer on Monday on Twitter. Internet experts suspected an error in the settings for the infrastructure through which users can access Facebook’s resources. As a result, the services could no longer be reached.
Large-scale failures of Internet services happen regularly. Often they are related to problems with the Domain Name System (DNS), which establishes the connection between a domain name such as www.facebook.com and the corresponding IP address.
According to some experts, the DNS entries of the Facebook services disappeared from the service that controls the data traffic – so they were, so to speak, invisible to the network infrastructure. In other words, Facebook removed the card thanks to which computers around the world can find the company’s services, wrote IT security expert Brian Krebs. “If someone types the address Facebook.com into their web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com and displays an error message.”
Worse still: The technology boss of the cloud service provider Cloudflare, John Graham-Cumming, pointed out that users and software were still trying to control Facebook services. That ensures a massive increase in the load on other DNS services, he wrote on Twitter.
Cyber attack on Facebook unlikely
Two unnamed IT security experts from Facebook told the “New York Times” that a cyber attack as the cause of the problems appeared unlikely. Because the technology behind the individual apps of the group is too different to bring them all offline at the same time with a cyber attack.
On the malfunction platforms, users sometimes reported problems with other online services, which were initially not confirmed on a large scale. At the large web service provider AWS from Amazon, which many start-ups and large companies rely on, all offers ran normally, according to the status page.
The DNSchecker.com site found problems with the facebook.com address in Europe, the US and some Asian countries on Monday afternoon. A DNS failure last week also resulted in the office messenger Slack being unavailable for a few hours. One day in July, the sites of Airbnb, UPS or the computer game store Steam fell victim to a DNS error.
However, it is rare that a failure affects such a large company as Facebook in such a concentrated manner. Most people worldwide are likely to be affected by the blackout of Facebook services: With the exception of Oculus, each of the Facebook apps has more than two billion users. In some Asian countries, Facebook’s services are almost synonymous with the Internet. Other social media apps such as Twitter or Tiktok, on the other hand, are still online.
For the company from Menlo Park, California, the blackout comes at a particularly critical time: on Sunday evening, the whistleblower and ex-employee Frances Haugen made serious allegations against the company in a television interview. Facebook puts growth and profits above the safety of users and society.
More: Facebook whistleblower reveals herself – and reveals secret business practices
With agency material.