If you are not able to access Facebook, and other Facebook-owned apps such as Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, luckily, you aren’t alone. Starting at around 11:40 ET on October 4th, website monitor Downdetector began seeing an increased number of reports of outages on all these services.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for the company, said at 12:07 ET that the company was working to quickly resolve the issue, but did not say what was causing it. An error page that appears when trying to connect to the platforms suggests that a bug in the Domain Name System (DNS) is to blame for the outage.
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.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021
It’s unclear how widespread the problem is, but Downdetector shows more than 30,000 outage reports just for Facebook and another 20,000 for Instagram. According to a tweet from the official Oculus Twitter account, the problem also affects the Oculus app, store, and website.