Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Hit the Digital Bone Dry
By Monday evening, the three social‑media giants were partially back up, but not until nearly six hours after the big blackout hit.
It all started around 12:00 PM Eastern Time (that’s 4:00 PM GMT or midnight Singapore time), when the apps went dark in what Downdetector called the biggest failure it has ever seen.
When the outage finally cracked open its pane
- At about 5:45 PM ET, some lucky users got bits and pieces back.
- The bad news spread faster than a meme: Facebook’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer, tweeted an apology, promising that “we may take some time to get to 100 per cent.”
- Shares of Facebook fell 4.9%, the worst single day drop since November of last year. In after‑hours trade, the stock perked up by 0.5% once the service returned.
Why did the whole thing go down?
Security experts whisper that it was likely an internal misstep, maybe simply a routing glitch that knocked out a key internet domain. Something the company’s own workers—who asked to stay anonymous—say looked like a “routing mistake” that snowballed thanks to other internal dependencies on the same domain.
One Harvard professor, Jonathan Zittrain, cheekily said, “Facebook basically locked its keys in its car.”
The error text that popped up on Facebook’s site pointed to a broken Domain Name System (DNS), which is how web addresses find their home on the internet.
Money lost in the blink of an eye
During those blackout minutes, Facebook was black‑listing about $545,000 per hour in ad revenue, according to Standard Media Index. That’s a costly crash in the world of digital advertising.
One more twist: a whistleblower arrival
Sunday’s drama wasn’t just about flakes; Frances Haugen, a former product manager on the civic misinformation team, kicked off a whistle‑blowing wave.
She handed over documents that fueled a Wall Street Journal exposé and a Senate hearing on Instagram’s impact on teen girls. Ahead of a scheduled talk on Tuesday, she plans to compare the company to tobacco firms that denied smoking was harmful for decades.
All in all…
- Tech giants faced a double blow – a massive outage and a public scandal about prioritizing profit over safety.
- Twitter, finance apps and other services were left gray‑listed while folks desperately tried to “talk” through WhatsApp” or scroll through Instagram, but their screens stayed stubbornly blank.
- Thankfully the gray‑listing was lifted around 5:45 PM ET, healing the digital skin and allowing a quick bud at the investor market.
In the grand tapestry of internet drama, it’s a reminder that even the best platforms can trip up, and sometimes it takes a whistleblower to keep them honest.
