Facebook DOWN: Biggest EVER outage hits millions, Facebook and Messenger offline

Facebook down reports are on the rise today, with countless people experiencing issues with both the social networking giant’s site and the Messenger app. Independent outage monitor has recorded a huge spike in both Facebook down and Messenger down reports. At the time of writing Down Detector UK has recorded a peak of more than 50,000 Facebook down reports.

While the independent outage monitor has also registered a peak of more than 8,000 Messenger down reports.

According to Down Detector stats, the vast majority of affected Facebook users are experiencing issues with the actual Facebook website.

While others are having problems with the Facebook app and server connection.

The Facebook outage began just before 5pm UK time – and over five hours later is still rumbling on. Besides the main Facebook service, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram are all experiencing service issues.

According Down Detector it’s the biggest outage the monitoring service has ever recorded – with millions of problems recorded in total.

At around 10pm UK time the @downdetector Twitter posted: “The Facebook outage continues and has become the largest outage we’ve ever seen on Downdetector with over 10.6 million problem reports from all over the globe.”

As the Facebook service issues hit users flocked to Twitter to report the problems they were facing.

One tweeted: “What going on with Facebook? #facebookdown”.

While another posted: “Pls I thought my internet went out but it’s just Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram shutting down.. AGAIN”.

One added: “Instagram down, Facebook down, WhatsApp down.”

And another wrote: “Here we go again. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are down.”

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The Facebook Twitter said: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

While the @WhatsApp account added: “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible.

“Thanks for your patience!”

The Instagram Comms Twitter posted: “Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it! #instagramdown”.

And the Messenger Twitter wrote: “Mercury in retrograde got the best of us. We’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and apologize for the inconvenience. #MessengerDown”.

Reports of issues with Facebook first began around 4.45pm UK time today – and, over five hours later, Facebook users are still being hit by the widespread outage.

It means today’s Facebook outage is the longest in the sites history.

When the outage hit the three hour marker the @NetBlocks Twitter account posted: “Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger have now been down globally for over three hours, the most severe outage on record to affect Facebook, Inc.”

It’s believed the lengthy Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram outage is related to a DNS issue.

Cybercrime journalist Brian Krebs on Twitter posted: “Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find http://Facebook.com or http://Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables.

“Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?

“To be more precise (and Geek Factor 5) the BGP routes serving Facebook’s authoritative DNS were withdrawn, rendering all Facebook domains inaccessible. That’s per @DougMadory, who knows a few things about BGP/DNS.”

As the widespread outage rumbled on Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer issued a statement on Twitter apologising for the service disruption – and saying teams for the Menlo Park-based firm are working as fast as possible to rectify the problem.

Schroepfer tweeted: “*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible”.

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