Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered a multi-hour global outage. Main

There has been a glitch in the operation of Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp . The services have been unavailable since approximately 18:40 Moscow time, and the glitch is global. Both the mobile apps and the desktop versions of Facebook and Instagram are unavailable. According to The New York Times, Facebook's internal services, through which the company's employees communicate, are also down; the company's employees cannot get to their workplaces because their passes do not work.

The reasons for the failure are still not entirely clear. Officially, Facebook only reported that they are working to fix the problem and apologized for the incident, but did not provide any details. NY Times sources in Facebook's security service said that the cause of the incident was unlikely to be a hacker attack, since the affected services operate independently of each other. Associated Press writes that the failure is likely related to problems in the configuration of DNS servers . Journalist Brian Krebs noted that on the morning of October 4, DNS addresses associated with Facebook were removed from global routing tables. Reuters notes that this was most likely the result of an error, but internal sabotage is also theoretically possible.

After Facebook became unavailable, users began to complain about the poor performance of other major services . Complaints were received about the lack of access to Twitter, Google, YouTube, Telegram, TikTok, VKontakte; some Russian users also complained about the performance of the Internet in general. These failures were not global and were mainly caused by a sharp increase in the number of users who switched to other messengers and services due to the unavailability of Facebook. In particular, Telegram confirmed that due to the influx of WhatsApp users, the messenger began to work slower. In general, all services affected by these problems remain available to the overwhelming majority of users.

The Facebook glitch has caused stock markets to fall . The Nasdaq Composite tech index fell by 2.2% in a few hours, while the Dow Jones and S&P 500 lost more than a percent. Facebook shares have fallen by more than 5%. The company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has lost about $6 billion in real time, according to Forbes, and has fallen from fifth to sixth place on the list of the world's richest people. Along with Facebook, other IT companies are also falling in price: Twitter shares have lost 6.7%, Google - 3%, Amazon - 2.8%.

In terms of duration, Facebook's outage was the longest since 2008. Then the social network was down for about a day. In 2008, only 80 million people used Facebook, while now this number exceeds three billion. Facebook's last major outage occurred in July 2019 - then the social network was completely unavailable for about an hour and worked intermittently for the entire day. The company explained this by incorrectly made changes to the server settings.