Facebook, Insta and Whatsapp down – for hours
Services are no longer available after an apparent technical error. This is very inconvenient for the group.
Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp icons can be seen on the smartphone screen.
Photo: Andrej Kokic (Keystone)
In the end, even the internal communications in the Facebook group didn’t work out. And the SMS service Twitter mocked its own account, saying: “We welcome literally everyone.” What happened? Experts were baffled by this, but only one thing was clear: Facebook and two of its other services, Whatsapp and Instagram, were Not available worldwide. After about six hours, it appears the group has managed to get the problem under control. Just before midnight, Swiss time, more and more users reported that the services of the largest Internet network in the world were again working for them.
What exactly is behind the massive failure is unclear. However, the Facebook group is not assuming any attack, the group’s employees told the New York Times. Internet experts see a possible cause in the so-called Domain Name System (DNS). A worldwide network of private server computers ensures that you are directed to the correct page when entering an address such as sbb.ch or facebook.com.
Because servers actually have names made up of long strings of numbers, IP addresses, which are hard to remember. As some experts have reported, DNS entries for Facebook services have disappeared from this service, which controls data traffic, and thus become almost invisible to the network infrastructure.
And this is the last time Facebook has fallen into a series of hits. At least since the allegations regarding the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, which have also been manipulated by Russia via social networks, criticism has increased. Then there was the scandal surrounding British firm Cambridge Analytica, which misused data that had already been released for research purposes. Co-founder and president Mark Zuckerberg has had to report to Washington several times, and his company’s reputation is bad. Several advertisers announced their withdrawal. In general, bad publicity did not harm Facebook financially, profits continued to flow. It doesn’t have to stay that way forever.
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