Why Facebook is not working and when it will be back along with WhatsApp and Instagram

Gulf Today Report

Services of social media giant Facebook, along with its WhatsApp and Instagram, have been disrupted in a major outage worldwide.

Experts indicate that such problems likely indicate there is a major problem, especially after hours of outage.

In 2019, Facebook suffered its worst ever outage that lasted for more than 24 hours.

Facebook might never truly reveal what caused the problems. After that record outage in 2019, it said only that the problems were a result of a server configuration change.

At least this time, some of the problems are related to the domain name system (DNS).

The Facebook logo is displayed next to a screen showing that the Facebook website is down. AFP

The DNS works something like a phone book for the internet.

When a user types in a web address such as facebook.com then the computer needs to turn that into an IP address, which is a series of numbers, so that it can access the data that makes up the page you want to see.

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Now that Facebook is down, users search for the DNS or the numbers it wants to access, but since those numbers are not there, the users get a blank page.

People using different browsers will see error codes.

WhatsApp and Instagram may run but the contents won't be updated, its users will see the older posts and messages.

It is far from the only company to suffer such issues. In July, many major websites – including those of seemingly unconnected companies such as Home Depot and Delta Airlines – went down because of problems at Akamai, which offers DNS to its customers.

But Facebook’s DNS problems are only a symptom, even if they are the one that means many people are unable to access those sites. The system would not break spontaneously, and so it is likely that something has happened to the underlying infrastructure – a stray settings change, a physical outage at a server, or something else entirely – that has stopped it from working.