What caused the outage of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp?

The problem that occurred to Facebook is not the same that happened to Instagram.

The main problem behind the Facebook outage is the de-announcement of their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) from its international Domain Name System (DNS).

In other terms, once you type facebook.com, you should be redirected to Facebook server IPs. On Monday, October 4th, this DNS pointing was detached or de- announced for Facebook, which led to this global outage.

As for Instagram, the DNS was resolving a name to the IP but was replying with a 503 error code which stands for internal server error: Instagram was online but failing in sending data to clients.

Facebook and WhatsApp, on the other hand, were entirely offline, unable to resolve the name to IP.

Not to forget that the Whatsapp website server is not the same as the Whatsapp application. But both of them were down during the outage.

For more clarifications, Teknologiia's team and I are always ready to take your questions and inquiries.