In the event of an unusually large outage, many Facebook groups services stopped working across the board on Monday. In addition to the actual Facebook system, many users were unable to access the WhatsApp chat service and the Instagram photo app, as reported by bug reports on websites such as Downdetector. A Facebook spokesperson apologized via Twitter and confirmed that the online network was working on the intrusion.
The causes of the problems were initially unknown. More than 50,000 incidents related to the Facebook group’s popular apps have been reported on Downdetector.com. Users in Austria were also affected. An error message on Facebook indicated that there was a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS). “We are aware that some people are currently experiencing issues with WhatsApp,” Facebook tweeted. They are working on a solution and will provide an update as soon as possible.
Among other things, the DNS ensures that the names of websites typed in letters are translated into IP addresses so that they can be accessed. John Graham Cumming, chief technology officer at cloud service provider Cloudflare, noted that users and software continue to try to control Facebook’s services. He wrote on Twitter that this ensures a massive increase in the load on other DNS services.
On broken platforms, users sometimes reported problems with other online services, which were initially not widely confirmed. For example, on the large web service provider AWS from Amazon, which many startups and large corporations rely on, all offerings work normally, according to the status page.
DNS disturbances happen again and again. In July, for example, one of them ensured that many sites were temporarily inaccessible. The operator at that time had problems with the web service provider Akamai. The centralization of network infrastructure at large providers ensures that company failure can lead to the removal of as many services and sites from the network as possible.
At the beginning of June, many websites around the world were unavailable for about an hour after a failure with the Fastly cloud service. At that time, the British government, Reddit and the portals of the Guardian, New York Times, Financial Times and Le Monde were affected.
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