Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are all down after the social media giant made changes to its web systems on Monday morning that caused it to 'disappear' from the internet directory, sparking a worldwide outage. Between 11.50am EST and 11.52am EST, Facebook made a series of updates to its border gateway protocol (BGP) which caused it to 'disappear' from the internet. The BGP allows for the exchange of routing information on the internet and takes people to the websites they want to access. Facebook's changes included withdrawals which removed its properties from the domain naming system it operates and essentially made it impossible for anyone to connect to the sites because they could no longer be found online. Facebook is yet to explain why the changes were made or why they caused such outages. The scandal-battered company's shares had dipped by 5 percent on Monday amid the outage and after a whistleblower went public on Sunday night with claims of how it regularly places profit above morals. The outages are affecting WhatsApp and Instagram along with Facebook. The cost of the outage is yet to be seen. CloudFare's Chief Technology Office John Graham-Cunningham tweeted on Monday that Facebook accidentally "disappeared" from the internet after making a "flurry" of updates to its BGP - Border Gateway Protocol. "Between 15:50 UTC and 15:52 UTC Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates," he said.
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Fear not, Facebook’s disappearance may be just what Dr. Zack would have ordered. We still have the AVA hard copies, the online edition, and the fast growing AVA Youtube channel
Not nearly long enough. A few days outage would encourage companies to create alternatives and people to take them.
A friend on social media said Facebook is back up. Anyone else able to confirm?
Yes, back.