WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook down! What has happened today?

Twitter was the only major social network still standing

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook go down in global outage 

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in global outage hitting the social networks.

All three apps are owned by Facebook, and as a result use the same infrastructure and all stopped functioning properly around 18:00 October 2021 

WhatsApp was the first to fail - initially the web version, then the phone app, before Facebook and Instagram followed suit, leaving users unable to view their messages or feeds on the three social networks.

The outage wasn't concentrated on one region either, with reports of issues throughout the USA, UK and Europe, as well as Latin America. But there are alternatives to WhatsApp you can use.

As is somewhat customary during such outages, users thought that the internet itself was down, or there was an issue with devices. However, other social networks such as Twitter, TikTok and Telegram were operating as normal.

The last time the three Facebook-owned networks went down was on March 19, 2021 and on that occasion it took a couple of hours for the sites to regain proper functionality.

Facebook's internal systems used by employees also went down. The company did not say what might be causing the outage, and while it can be normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, one on a global scale is rare. 

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc., said it appears that the routes Facebook advertises online that tell the entire internet how to reach its properties are not available.

Madory said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn. The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed. DNS translates an address like "facebook.com" to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook's DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.