Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Down in “Epic” Configuration Error Outage

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suffer DNS related outage described as "epic" and a "nightmare." This is what happened Facebook, Instagram, WhatsAPP and Oculus VR went down early on October 4, 2021. The outage continued through the afternoon. It’s been determined from multiple sources that the outage is likely due to a major misconfiguration that knocked the sites completely off the Internet in what has been described as an epic and nightmare scenario.

Earlier Monday Facebook began slowing down and completely stopped, with browsers unable to resolve the domain. The problem happened across other Facebook owned sites as well.

Facebook Wiped Off the Internet

The configuration errors that caused Facebook to go offline appear to have done more than just take it offline, it essentially made Facebook disappear from the Internet.

In one of the stranger side effects of the Facebook BGP Routing error outage, the Facebook domain itself was listed in a whois lookup as being available for registration, presumably because the Facebook domain essentially no longer exists.

Who is domain name lookup services and domain name registrars are reporting that the Facebook domain name does not exist and is available for sale.

A GoDaddy Brand Listed the Facebook Domain for Sale BGP Routing

The problem may be due to configuration of Facebook’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing. The BGP routing protocol is a service that calculates the most efficient path to reach a website through the multiple autonomous systems/networks that form the Internet.

When a browser asks for Facebook.com the domain name is translated by the DNS system to an Internet Protocol address (IP address) to a series of numbers that is an address. That IP address number is the address of the content on Facebook’s servers. The browser makes the request and the BGP routing system calculates the fastest series of network hops to reach that content on Facebook’s servers.

Facebook BGP Routes Withdrawn

According to reports on Twitter, the BGP routes to Facebook have been dropped from the Internet.

The CTO of Cloudflare tweeted that five minutes before the Facebook DNS stopped working, they noticed a large number of BGP route withdrawals.