Multiple security experts have pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem as a possible cause of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram global outage.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all went down on Monday evening, October 4, 2021.
A public statement from the three Facebook services shared on Twitter confirmed the outages.
According to the statement released by Facebook on “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products”.
Facebook added in its tweet that “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
An Outage tracking site Down Detector says it logged tens of thousands of reports for each of the services.
Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but could not load new content or send messages.
No reason for the outages was immediately made known.
However, the experts in tweets sighted by African Entertainment pointed to DNS problem as the cause of the outage.
Cisco’s internet analysis division ThousandEyes tweeted that its tests revealed the outage was due to an ongoing DNS failure.
A DNS otherwise referred to as the “phonbook of the internet”, translates website names into Internet Protocol addresses that can be read by a computer. It’s often called the “phonebook of the internet.”
In a tweet about four hours after the social media platforms went down, Facebook CTO Mark Schroepfer, stated that : “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Facebook saw its shares falling more than 5% in midday trading Monday, according to a report African Entertainment monitored on CNN.