new York 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.
Users of Internet providers such as Telekom, Vodafone, O2 and 1 & 1 users also report problems with the mobile Internet, but also with the landline Internet. It is not yet clear whether these are related to the problems with Facebook.
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.
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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.
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.
DNSchecker.com is currently experiencing problems with facebook.com in Europe, the USA and some Asian countries. 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.
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