The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other related products, such as Facebook Messanger and Workplace, have also stopped working.
At time of writing, it is unclear what has caused the issue although the company has suffered outages before
In June & April this year, the SOCIAL MEDIA GIANT'S PLATFORM UNEXPECTEDLY WENT DOWN
due to a “network configuration issue”.
Facebook ‘withdrawn’ from the phone book of the internet
Facebook appears to have had its DNS records taken from the global routing tables. That’s according to Brian Krebs, a cyber security expert who runs a popular blog.
In slightly less nerdy speak, that means that effectively Facebook.com, Instagram.com and presumably the rest have had their records wiped from the internet’s address book. When you type one of those URLs into your internet browser, it should be able to speak to Facebook and ask it where it needs to go – but the system that does so has been withdrawn.
It’s like turning up at the Facebook office for a meeting but the receptionist isn’t there. You (or your computer) are just stuck at the desk, since you (or it) don’t know the number of the office door you’re trying to get to. (Or something like that analogy.)
It’s not clear why that happened. Facebook is so big that it runs its own DNS – unlike other, smaller companies – so only someone at Facebook would have the power to stop it running, too.
Here’s Krebs saying much the same thing, in a more legitimate way
