Not just you: Facebook, instagram and WhatsApp went offline on Monday morning. According to security reporter Brian Krebs, Facebook said it was aware of the outage, which also affected Facebook’s internal tools.
John Graham Cumming, chief technology officer of cloudflare, said that Facebook’s DNS had stopped working and noted that the company’s BGP or border gateway protocol had changed. Patrick collison, chief executive of stripe, pointed out that the protocol was known as the “postal service of the Internet”, or “The dark magic of the Internet”.
Just a day ago, a 60 minute episode revealed that the former Facebook product manager shared the internal documents used by the Wall Street Journal in its recent “Facebook files” report. These stories revealed how Facebook knew that “its platform is full of vulnerabilities that cause harm, which is usually fully understood by only the company.”
“I’ve seen on Facebook again and again that there is a conflict of interest between what’s good for the public and what’s good for Facebook,” whistleblower Francis Hogan said in a 60 minute episode. “Facebook optimizes its own interests again and again, such as making more money.”
Downdetector shows the downtime of other non Facebook platforms, including T-Mobile and Amazon. (latest news: T-Mobile says its users are being affected by the interruption of other third-party applications). But twitter seems to be working well.
Update, PT: cloudflare posted a blog post at 2:48 p.m. on Monday, “learn how Facebook disappeared from the Internet”, describing this situation as “someone ‘pulled out the cable’ from their data center and disconnected them from the Internet.”
“Today’s events gently remind us that the Internet is a very complex and interdependent system, with millions of systems and protocols working together,” the blog post pointed out. “Trust, standardization and cooperation among entities are at the core of enabling them to play a role in nearly 5 billion active users around the world.”