Facebook goes down; taking WhatsApp, Oculus, and Instagram with it

All Facebook services are currently offline, including WhatsApp, Instagram, the Oculus App/Store and Facebook itself. The issue, apparently, stems from a DNS issue, which is preventing internet users from accessing Facebook’s servers. 

Downdetector has tracked over 80,000 reports of a WhatsApp outage and over 50,000 for Facebook. Based on internet chatter, Facebook appears to be down worldwide, and Facebook has already confirmed that they are working to “get things back to normal as quickly as possible”. Ironically, this announcement was made through Twitter, a competing service. 

It is unknown how long this outage will last or what caused the outage. Given the scale of this outage, perhaps it is time for Facebook to consider decentralising its infrastructure. As today has shown, a single error can take down Facebook’s app/service empire, and that shouldn’t be the case for one of the world’s wealthiest companies.  

You can join the discussion on Facebook’s global outage on the OC3D Forums.