On 4 Oct 2021 Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been down for nearly six-hour and Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing all its web and apps platforms owned by Facebook.
Facebook didn’t provide any specifics about the reason for the problem but an error message on Facebook’s webpage make experts believe the outage is related to issues with internet infrastructure, specifically DNS
What is DNS ?
DNS stands for ‘Domain Name System’.
DNS translates easy-to-remember domain names to numerical IP addresses.
In other meaning, DNS is a service that translates domains into IP addresses.
An IP address looks like 192.168.1.1
For example, when you type our domain name (https://saedx.com) into your browser, the internet service provider (ISP) views the DNS of our domain name and translates it into IP address then directs your internet connection to our server where we have stored the data files of our website, delivering up this set of stored files.
These stored files include all the content, HTML, images, CSS, videos, fonts, JavaScript files, and more which show up as a website.
Now back to the Facebook issue, for some unknown reason, Facebook’s DNS records, as well as BGP records, are gone from the internet. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the system that figures out the best route for a packet to travel across the internet.
According to a Facebook company source to Reuters said that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain that was compounded by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work.
