A major outage has impacted Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp overnight for Australian users. The impact to users was that messages weren’t sending, feeds weren’t loading and access to some features simply broke. If you check out some of the data available from Downdetector, it shows that this wasn’t localised either.
After approximately six hours the services began to return to normal but not without flow-on impact. The hashtag #FacebookIsDown was trending — and hilarious — on Twitter. Other messaging services were seeing the impact of users flocking to other platforms. And of course, the world was devoid of influencers telling us how good a product (they’re paid to use) is.
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
After an acknowledgement from Facebook, the issue was resolved and services returning, there — at the time of writing — is no official confirmation of the cause. From a technical standpoint, it appears that the issue was DNS related rather than an infrastructure failure. If nothing else, outages like this show that no service is infallible and there should always be a backup option for communication.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/