You can’t use “Login with Facebook” on third-party sites, for instance. Which also means that more than just Facebook’s external services are affected. For once, Facebook has stopped advertising. After all, he says, the internet is essentially a network of networks, each advertising its presence to the other. (Facebook confirmed as much in an engineering blog post on Monday evening.) “It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet,” says John Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, who stressed that he doesn’t know the details of what happened. The internet infrastructure experts who spoke to WIRED all suggested the likeliest answer was a misconfiguration on Facebook’s part. In this case, though, something more serious appears to be afoot. They can happen for all kinds of wonky technical reasons, often related to configuration issues, and can be relatively straightforward to resolve.

DNS is often referred to as the internet’s phone book it’s what translates the host names you type into a URL tab-like -into IP addresses, which is where those sites live.ĭNS mishaps are common enough, and when in doubt, they're the reason why a given site has gone down. The company’s family of apps effectively fell off the face of the internet at 11:40 am ET, according to when its Domain Name System records became unreachable. It’s a social media blackout that can most charitably be described as “thorough” and seems likely to prove particularly tough to fix.įacebook itself has not confirmed the root cause of its woes, but clues abound on the internet.

A Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus outage knocked every corner of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire offline on Monday.

Whatsapp app down