Why Has Facebook and It’s Platforms Crashed? We May Never Know

The world is reeling, people are chewing fingernails, and bored kids can't Instagram. Messenger not working, either.

Monday. Oct. 4, 2021 marks the second major worldwide outage of the world's largest social media platforms since 2019.

According to a variety of sources, including the British popular paper The Independent, in 2019 the major crash was caused by "a server configuration change." 

They've tended to be tight-lipped about such things.

But The Independent and other sources say this one might have more to do with the Domain Name System (DNS).  In simple terms, it's like a phone book. When you type in a website, such as "facebook.com"  the DNS turns that into an IP address so it can find the page you want to see. Every computer and page etc. have IP addresses, kind of like house numbers.

Anyway, The Independent offers an excellent explanation:

With Facebook down, however, that system is not working: the computer searches for the numbers it wants to see, but the numbers aren’t there. Facebook’s servers should provide them, but the phone book is in effect blank." (The Independent)

Your mobile app version of Facebook and Instagram work a little differently, they are still allowing you to see content that's already been downloaded or seen. But you can't see what's new.  Desktop users can't get into the site, mobile app users can only see 'old' data.

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The Independent says the DNS issue is only a "symptom," some sort of stray error, mistake or issue caused it.  No word on when it will be restored.

But you can bet with a multi-billion dollar publicly traded social media giant like Facebook, they're working on it with every person available, except for the janitor.

SO while you're waiting, have some fun with these.