Twitter were quick to welcome literally everyone as the social media site gained relevancy due to WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram crashing this evening. Indeed, it wasn’t just frustrated users that remembered that Twitter existed, the three Facebook owned platforms had to take to Twitter themselves to keep users updated on their status.
Hello Literally Everyone
hello literally everyone
— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021
It’s rare for a platform to crash so completely, indeed whilst Messenger is heavily integrated with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are largely separate platforms although since acquisition they are now part of the Facebook family. Downdetector reveals issues with the sites started around 4.30pm and now five hours later people in the UK, the US and around the world are still experiencing problems. It’s not one platform – desktop, app and server connections all appear to be at fault.
Initially when you log in, you might not notice any issues as any previously downloaded messages will appear on your mobile app, but try to download new messages (not that you’re likely to have any as no one can send them) or attempt to send a message and you’re likely to find that there’s a problem.
The general thinking at the moment is that this might be a DNS (domain name server) issue, which is in itself somewhat surprising as Facebook are one of the few companies big enough to run their own DNS servers. Whether this is correct or not we’re unlike to receive confirmation as Facebook haven’t in the past revealed what went wrong when their services crashed. Their last major outage was in March 2019.
NB You may also run into problems logging into third party sites which use your Facebook log in credentials – until Facebook is back up and running they won’t work as they can’t be validated.
