WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook fell for a long time, even up to 6 hours in some areas. Currently, the WhatsApp down and friends problem has been successfully resolved, but Facebook did not explain in detail the cause behind it.
"We encountered a networking issue and the team is working as quickly as possible to fix it," said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer.
"To the large community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we're sorry. We're working hard to restore access to our apps and services and we're pleased to report that they're back online. Thank you for your patience," Facebook said.
This disturbance is massive in scale. "I don't know if I've ever witnessed this kind of disruption from a major internet company," said Doug Madory of internet analytics firm Kentik.
He said internet companies sometimes lose connection when updating network configurations. That, for example, happened to Fastly, a cloud company, which crashed last June for about an hour. But the fact that a company as big as Facebook with so many resources that it suffers hours of disruption means the problem is serious.
Some security experts say the disturbance experienced by Facebook may be related to the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is sometimes referred to as the internet phone book which translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by computers.
Well, DNS errors are apparently quite common and are the reason some sites crash. The reasons are related to technical issues, such as configuration issues and can usually be fixed quickly. But in some cases, the problem is serious.
Internet infrastructure experts say there may be a misconfiguration by Facebook. "It looks like Facebook is doing something to their router that connects the Facebook network to the rest of the internet," said John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare.
